Borage Flower & Leaf Earrings

You planted it for the bees and then you fell completely in love with it yourself. That is what borage does. It shows up in the garden all fuzzy and a little rough around the edges and then one day it opens those extraordinary blue star flowers and suddenly every bee in the neighborhood knows your address and you have started putting the blossoms on top of everything you bake. Nobody warned you this would happen. It happens every time.

The Borage

Borage has been growing in gardens since ancient times, native originally to the Mediterranean and brought along wherever people traveled because it was too useful and too beautiful to leave behind. The Romans knew it as a plant of courage. Pliny the Elder wrote about its healing properties. Beekeepers have grown it for centuries specifically to draw pollinators, and its common names tell you everything about its reputation among them. Bee bread. Beeplant. Bee bush. A single borage plant in full bloom is a pollinator magnet of the first order, attracting native bees, bumblebees, butterflies, hoverflies, and beneficial insects with a generosity that makes it one of the most valuable annual plants you can put in a garden.

The star-shaped flowers are that particular vivid blue that seems almost too saturated to be real, and they nod slightly on their stems the way flowers do when they are completely comfortable where they are. The whole plant is covered in fine white bristly hairs, which is exactly what its scientific name Borago officinalis refers to, the word borra being Latin for a hairy garment. The flowers turn pink after pollination, a quiet signal to passing pollinators that this one has been visited already, please move along. The plant is self-seeding and will return year after year once it finds a spot it likes, which is how gardens that plant borage once tend to have borage forever.

The Piece

Each earring is a borage flower in sterling silver, its five pointed star petals etched with the detail of the real bloom, a small center cone rendered in careful relief. Below the flower hangs a cluster of two borage leaves, their surfaces pressed from real leaves so every vein is a permanent record of an actual plant, the characteristic crinkled texture of borage foliage captured in the metal.

Here is the part that makes these earrings particularly wonderful. The leaf clusters are removable. The flower sits on a post that goes through your ear, and then you slide the leaf cluster onto the post before putting the earring back on. You can wear the leaves hanging in front of your earlobe, or behind it, or leave them off entirely and wear just the flowers. Three different earrings in one pair, which feels exactly right for a plant this versatile.

Every pair is made to order just for you from sterling silver, hand etched and detailed, and because each one is made by hand no two pairs will ever be exactly alike.

The Craftsmanship

• Earrings: flower post stud with removable leaf cluster dangle
• Material: sterling silver throughout, oxidized
• Detail: hand etched flower petals, real leaf impressions on leaf clusters
• Style: post earring with removable dangle leaves, three wearing options
• Edition: made to order, each pair unique

One of a Kind

Every pair of these earrings is its own slightly unique thing because every pair is made by hand and every real leaf pressed into the silver is its own unrepeatable record. No two pairs will ever look exactly alike, just as no two borage plants in the garden ever look exactly alike.

A Note from Tamara

I grow borage in my garden every year primarily for the pollinators and secondarily because I find those blue star flowers completely irresistible. There is something about a plant that is a little rough and a little wild looking and then produces something that extraordinary that feels like a good reminder about not judging things too quickly. I made these earrings with removable leaves because I wanted the person wearing them to have options, which is also something borage believes in strongly. It will self-seed wherever it pleases and it will be beautiful about it and you will not mind at all.

Shipping

Your borage earrings will be made to order just for you in my little studio in the New Hampshire woods. Please allow one to two weeks for them to be created. You will receive a tracking number by email so you can follow them on their journey to their new home.