You are walking through the woods and you almost step on them. Two mushrooms growing so close together they share the same patch of ground, their caps nearly touching, their bases tangled in the same roots and soil. You stop. You crouch down. You look at them for longer than you meant to, the way you always do when the forest puts something small and perfect directly in your path.
The Mushroom
Mushrooms are not plants. They are the fruiting bodies of fungi, the visible portion of an underground network that can extend for acres in every direction, connecting trees and exchanging nutrients through a web of mycelium that forest ecologists have called the wood wide web. What you see above ground is only ever the smallest part of what is happening below it.
Two mushrooms growing side by side from the same patch of forest floor are rarely strangers. They are almost certainly connected underground, part of the same organism or at minimum part of the same mycelial network, their roots entangled in the dark with those of the trees above them, passing water and carbon and minerals back and forth in a system of exchange so complex and so ancient that scientists are still mapping its full dimensions. Fungi have been doing this work for roughly 900 million years. Every fallen tree and every dead leaf in a healthy forest is being quietly disassembled and returned to the soil by fungi working below the surface. The small spotted mushroom pushing up through the leaf litter is the visible tip of something vast and essential and almost entirely invisible.
The Piece
A circular sterling silver frame, like a tiny porthole looking into the forest floor, like a curiosity cabinet small enough to wear on your finger. Inside it two mushrooms grow together, their speckled caps rendered in careful texture, their stalks rising from bases still rough with soil and the suggestion of roots just pulled from the earth. Between them and below them the forest floor spreads in miniature, two fern fronds unfurling at the base, a small coiled tendril reaching upward on one side the way new fern growth always does before it opens. Every single element was made from scratch from recycled sterling silver, carved and textured and oxidized so the whole scene reads in rich layered relief, shadow pooling in the forest floor and light catching the tops of the mushroom caps.
The ring fits approximately a size 7.5. If you would like this ring made in a different size please send a message before purchasing and a new one will be made just for you.
The Craftsmanship
- Ring: circular frame with forest floor scene
- Material: recycled sterling silver throughout, oxidized
- Size: approximately 7.5
- Custom sizing: available, send a message to order
- Edition: one of a kind as shown, custom sizes made to order
One of a Kind
There is only one of this ring exactly as shown. These two mushrooms, these fern fronds, this particular forest floor in this particular circular frame: they exist once. If you order a custom size your ring will be made fresh by hand and will be its own slightly unique version of this scene.
A Note from Tamara
I think about mushrooms differently than I used to, now that I know what is happening underneath them. Every time I find a pair growing together like this I think about the mycelium connecting them below the surface, the whole quiet network doing its essential work in the dark. I made this ring as a tiny keepsake of that feeling, a small circular window into the forest floor that you can carry with you. A curiosity cabinet for your finger. I hope whoever wears it stops to look at mushrooms a little longer the next time they find them on a walk.
Shipping
Your ring is finished, packaged safely, and will be on its way to you within 3 to 5 business days.