There is a moment in very early spring, before anything else has happened, when you can find them if you know where to look. Down close to the ground in the damp leaf litter, tight bright green coils pushing up through the cold soil like something winding itself up before it springs. If you know what a violin looks like, you will recognize the shape immediately. If you do not, you might think something small and ancient is slowly waking up in the forest floor. You would not be wrong.
The Fiddlehead
Ferns are among the oldest plants on Earth, unchanged in their essential design for over 300 million years. They were here before the dinosaurs. They have been unfurling their fiddleheads in the damp spring forest since before there were forests as we understand them, and they have not changed their approach since.
The fiddlehead is the name for a young fern frond in its earliest stage, still tightly coiled in that distinctive spiral before it opens. The name comes from the scrolled end of a violin, and once you know that you will never be able to look at one without hearing music. Every fern produces fiddleheads as it grows, unrolling its frond from the tip downward in a slow unfurling that is one of the most satisfying things spring has to offer if you are paying attention. The whole process is controlled by the same mathematical spiral found throughout nature, the same Fibonacci geometry that governs a nautilus shell and the center of a sunflower. The forest floor is doing mathematics and making it look effortless.
Ferns do not flower and they do not produce seeds. They reproduce through spores released from the undersides of their fronds, and they have been doing it successfully for longer than flowering plants have existed. They are quiet, patient, deeply rooted, and completely at home in the shade. The mushrooms growing alongside them in this ring feel like exactly the right neighbors.
The Piece
A tiny chunk of forest set inside a coffin-shaped frame, edged all the way around with a border of fine granulation that catches the light like soil catching morning dew. The background has been oxidized to a deep black that makes every element read with the kind of clarity you get from looking at something in low forest light. At the top of the scene a fiddlehead fern rises with its frond still tightly coiled, the spiral rendered with quiet precision. At the base a trio of mushrooms clusters together in the soil, their caps smooth and round at different heights the way mushrooms always seem to arrange themselves like they are having a conversation.
The double band sits clean and simple beneath the frame, a size 7.5.
The Craftsmanship
- Ring face: approximately coffin shaped, hand carved sterling silver scene
- Material: sterling silver throughout, oxidized
- Band: double band, size 7.5
- Edition: one of a kind
One of a Kind
There is only one of this ring in the world. This fiddlehead, these three mushrooms, this particular oak leaf in this particular coffin of silver: they exist once. When it finds its person it will never be made again exactly like this.
A Note from Tamara
I have a deep fondness for the parts of the forest that most people walk right past. The fiddleheads pushing up through last year's leaves. The mushrooms appearing overnight in the damp soil. The oak leaves slowly becoming part of the ground they fell on. These are not the dramatic parts of the forest. They are the quiet working parts, the parts that hold everything together and keep it running. I made this ring for the person who notices those things. The one who stops and crouches down to look. The coffin shape felt right because this is a piece about cycles, about the things that grow from what has ended, about the whole beautiful system of the forest floor doing its slow and necessary work.
Shipping
Your fiddlehead fern ring is finished, packaged safely, and will be on its way to you within 3 to 5 business days.