Someone is going to admire this necklace and then look a little closer and find Darwin and that moment is going to be extremely satisfying for everyone involved except possibly Darwin who was hoping not to be noticed.
The Flowering Dogwood
Here is something most people do not know about dogwood flowers. Those four white shapes that make the flowering dogwood one of the most recognizable and beloved spring trees in North America are not petals. They are bracts, modified leaves whose entire purpose is to look like petals so that pollinators will visit the actual flowers, which are the small tight cluster of yellow-green structures at the very center of each bract arrangement. The dogwood is running an elaborate visual deception on every bee and butterfly that visits it, and it has been working beautifully for millions of years.
The native flowering dogwood, Cornus florida, blooms earlier in spring than almost any other tree, timed with extraordinary precision to coincide exactly with the emergence of local pollinators from winter dormancy. When the first bees and flies are out looking for nectar and pollen and finding very little of it anywhere, the dogwood is already in full bloom, a reliable early season food source that supports dozens of native bee species, bee flies, syrphid flies, and the Spring Azure butterfly, which uses dogwood as one of its larval host plants. The timing is not accidental. The tree and its pollinators have been calibrating this relationship for a very long time.
And then the whole tree keeps giving. The red berries that follow the flowers ripen in October just as migrating songbirds need to fuel their journeys south. The fallen leaves decompose three to ten times faster than most other tree species and release extraordinary amounts of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and trace minerals back into the soil, enriching the forest floor for every plant growing nearby. The dogwood is not just beautiful. It is doing essential work in every season of its life.
Darwin knows a good tree when he finds one.
The Beetle
His name is Darwin, after Charles Darwin, who loved beetles with a devotion that bordered on the unreasonable and who would have understood completely why a beetle would choose to spend his time in a dogwood.
As a young man at Cambridge, Darwin collected beetles with such obsessive enthusiasm that he became locally famous for it. He would spend entire days searching under bark and in leaf litter and along the edges of ponds, and when he ran out of hands to hold his specimens he would put a live beetle in his mouth to free them up. He once wrote about the thrill of finding a rare species with such joy that it is impossible to read without smiling. Beetles were, for a time, the great love of his scientific life, and it was that same obsessive attention to the natural world that eventually took him aboard the Beagle and changed everything we know about life on Earth. Every naturalist who has ever crouched down in the mud to look at something small and overlooked owes something to Darwin and his beetles.
This Darwin is hiding in a dogwood. He is doing exactly what his namesake would have wanted.
The Piece
Three dogwood flowers cluster together across the face of this pendant, each bract pressed from a real leaf so that every vein you see is a permanent record of an actual leaf that once existed on an actual plant. The bracts are broad and deeply textured, each one slightly different in the way that real dogwood bracts are slightly different from each other, their characteristic notched tips visible at the outer edge. At the center of each flower the true flowers are rendered as tight clusters of tiny granules, exactly as they look in nature, small and unpretentious and completely surrounded by the show the bracts are putting on around them.
And somewhere in this cluster Darwin is hiding. He was carved entirely from sterling silver, his body given the texture and details of his real counterparts, and he has positioned himself among the flowers with the confidence of someone who believes very strongly in his own camouflage. He is not entirely wrong. He blends in remarkably well. The moment when someone admiring your necklace suddenly finds him is one of the best things about wearing this piece.
The pendant hangs on a 22 inch hand pieced sterling silver chain of circles and delicately twisted links, each one soldered by hand.
The Craftsmanship
- Pendant: sterling silver, oxidized, real leaf impressions in each bract
- Material: sterling silver throughout, oxidized
- Chain: 22 inch hand pieced sterling silver chain
- Edition: one of a kind
One of a Kind
There is only one Darwin. These three dogwood flowers, these real leaf impressions, this particular beetle in this particular hiding spot: they exist once. When Darwin finds his person he will never be made again exactly like this.
A Note from Tamara
I love the dogwood for all the reasons everyone loves the dogwood, that particular quality of spring light coming through those white bracts, the way a whole tree in bloom looks like something out of a dream. But I love it even more knowing what it is actually doing, the precise timing of it, the way it feeds the first pollinators of the year and the last migrating birds of the fall and enriches the soil with its fallen leaves all winter. I named the beetle Darwin because hiding a beetle in a piece of jewelry and then naming it after the man who once put a live beetle in his own mouth in the name of science felt completely right. I hope whoever wears this feels that same delight every time someone spots him. Darwin has been waiting patiently for his person. He is very good at waiting.
Shipping
Your Darwin is finished, packaged safely, and will be on his way to you within 3 to 5 business days.