You know the feeling. You are walking past a garden bed in early April, the ground still cold, and something catches your eye. Color. Actual color, right there at the edge of the soil, completely unbothered by the temperature. A pansy, open and cheerful and entirely pleased with itself, while everything else in the garden is still thinking about it. You stop. You smile. You cannot help it. That is what pansies do. They have been doing it for a very long time.
The Pansy and the Daffodil
The modern garden pansy traces its ancestry to a small European wildflower called Viola tricolor, which was known long before anyone thought to cultivate it by a collection of names so charming they deserve to be said aloud. Heartsease. Come-and-cuddle-me. Love-in-idleness. Jack-jump-up-and-kiss-me. Tickle-my-fancy. Someone in the history of English botany was paying very close attention and having an excellent time about it.
The word pansy itself comes from the French pensée, meaning thought, which is why in the Victorian language of flowers the pansy represented remembrance and affectionate thinking of someone you love. They appear in Shakespeare, in mythology, in memorial gardens, in the hands of people who want to say something tender without quite saying it out loud. The three original colors of the wild pansy, purple, white, and gold, were each assigned their own meaning: memories, loving thoughts, and souvenirs. A flower that carries all three things at once felt like an appropriate choice for a piece of jewelry that might be worn in someone's memory.
Daffodils have their own long history of meaning, arriving so early and so cheerfully that every culture that has grown them has eventually decided they represent hope and new beginnings and the particular stubborn joy of something that returns every year no matter what happened the year before.
Together these two flowers bloom in the same cold weeks of early spring, keeping each other company at the edge of the season, telling everyone who will listen that something better is on its way.
The Piece
At the center of this bracelet a large hand carved pansy spreads its layered petals in deep oxidized silver, every petal veined and textured, the face markings that give pansies their characteristic expression rendered in careful shadow and light. At the center a genuine faceted pink tourmaline stone glows, that warm vivid pink exactly the color of the pansy faces that catch your eye in early spring. On each side of the center bloom a miniature daffodil flower accent sits within its own small oval frame, each one a complete and detailed flower in its own right, the trumpet center rising from the petals in the way that makes daffodils so immediately recognizable even at this tiny scale.
The two strands of sterling silver chain connect all three flowers and close with a lobster clasp, the whole bracelet approximately 7.5 inches long. Every element was made by hand from recycled sterling silver.
The Craftsmanship
- Bracelet: approximately 7.5 inches long
- Stone: faceted pink tourmaline, center set
- Material: recycled sterling silver throughout, oxidized
- Closure: lobster clasp
- Edition: one of a kind
One of a Kind
There is only one of this bracelet in the world. This pansy, these daffodils, this particular pink stone at the center: they exist once. When it finds its person it will never be made again exactly like this.
A Note from Tamara
I made this bracelet because pansies and daffodils are the flowers I associate most with the people in my life who have come and gone and left something good behind. There is a reason pansies have been planted in remembrance gardens for hundreds of years. There is a reason daffodils keep coming back. I hope whoever wears this thinks of someone they love every time they put it on, and I hope it makes them smile the way a pansy at the edge of a cold April garden always does. That small cheerful stubborn thing, just showing up anyway. That is the whole message.
Shipping
Your bracelet is finished, packaged safely, and will be on its way to you within 3 to 5 business days.