Wood handplanes: Grain orientation/species?

I guess reading David Finck's "Mastering and making Wooden Hand Planes" and Whelan's "Making Traditional Wooden Planes" has inspired me to make a wooden hand plane. I'm thinking of making a nice 24" long Razee Jointer plane. But in my quest to understand more about the techniques, I've come across some issues that raise questions.

In the FWW book "Working with hand planes", there is an article (from FWW issue #126) by David Welter entitled "Wooden Planes". In this article he constructs a Krenov style hand plane. Simple enough, right? But in this article the author glues a hard wood "sole plate" onto the bottom. The procedure detailed in Finck's book does not include this detail.

My first question concerns the grain direction for this sole plate. If the grain for the body is horizontal (parallel to the floor), wouldn't that mean that the sole plate's grain has to run in the same direction? Otherwise, seasonal movement would cause cracking. Right?

The second question is directed more at the species of wood I'd like to use. While most of the books I have read prefer maple and Beech, as well as some exotics, I wanted to make mine out of wood I could obtain locally (or have already). I have some nice dry 4" thick cherry I sawed up several years ago. My thought was to make the body out of cherry, and then add a sole of some very hard local wood like osage or hickory. So, is cherry "heavy" enough? If pressed I suppose could probably find some 8/4 hickory and make a big enough blank by gluing 2 pieces together. But that hickory is TOUGH stuff to work with!

Thanks in advance,

Dominic, if you are like me you will never be satisfied with the first plane. You will continue to tinker with the design, it's like the work bench after you make the first you find out what you really needed. So I say it doesn't matter what wood you choose, Cherry I think would be fine no need to add a harder sole. Use it for a while and if you really like to keep it as a user just add a small strip as a throat plate in front of the blade.