Floating shelf is a typical structural form of column base in traditional wood structure, and wood column is prone to swing under horizontal load. The rocking behavior of timber columns shows that the floating column base joints have semi-rigid characteristics, which plays an important role in resisting lateral load and maintaining overall stability of timber structures. In this paper, a modeling method of rocking wood column base joints is proposed. A row of axial springs are arranged at the column base to simulate the stress state of the contact interface between the column bottom and the foundation stone. The corresponding numerical model is established based on the OpenSees platform. The validity of the modeling method is verified by comparing with the refined finite element model and the experimental data in a large number of related literatures. At the same time, some factors affecting the modeling method are analyzed, including the contact stiffness, distribution mode, spring number and material constitutive of the column spring. The results show that the modeling method is relatively insensitive to the contact stiffness. It is suggested that the effective compression depth of the timber column is the radius of the timber column to determine the contact stiffness of each spring element. The three distribution modes are applicable to the modeling method, and the number of spring units should be no less than 10. For wood columns with high axial compression ratio, the ElasticPP material constitutive considering the spring element entering plasticity should be adopted in the modeling process.