Lesbos petrified forest
— a forest the ash stopped in place and never moved again.
Not only on a wall.
Lesbos petrified forest, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“On the dry west end of Lesbos, near the small port of Sigri, a forest of standing tree trunks turned to stone about twenty million years ago when a volcano farther east buried it under ash and pyroclastic flow. Cell walls were replaced silica by silica, and the rings, knots, and bark survived. The site spans roughly fifteen thousand hectares and was inscribed as a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2012. Walking trails lead past sequoias, pines, and palms still rooted in the ash that killed them. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
The Petrified Forest of Lesbos lies on the volcanic west end of the island, around the small port of Sigri and the village of Antissa, about ninety kilometres by road from Mytilene. The forest was buried by ash and pyroclastic flow from a volcanic complex centred farther east on the island roughly twenty million years ago, during the Early Miocene. Standing trunks, root systems, and fallen logs were silicified in place. The protected area spans about fifteen thousand hectares and was inscribed as a UNESCO Global Geopark in 2012.
The trees were preserved by permineralisation: silica-rich groundwater moving through the ash slowly replaced the cell walls of the buried wood molecule by molecule, retaining annual rings, knots, and the texture of the bark. Identified species include ancestral sequoias, pines, oaks, palms, and cinnamon-laurels, a flora consistent with the warm humid climate of the Early Miocene Aegean. The Natural History Museum of the Petrified Forest, opened at Sigri in 1994, holds standing trunks up to about seven metres tall recovered from quarries inside the protected area.
The main visitor park, Plaka, lies a few kilometres east of Sigri and is open most of the year, with marked walking trails that loop past the largest standing trunks. The Natural History Museum in Sigri carries the indoor collection and a film on the eruption sequence. The west end of Lesbos is dry, treeless today, and exposed to the meltemi wind in summer; spring is the gentlest season for walking the trails. The port at Sigri has a small line of tavernas and a Wednesday ferry to mainland Lavrion in season.
