Mallorca almond blossom orchard
— the three weeks the island turns white and pink.
Not only on a wall.
Mallorca almond blossom orchard, 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.
“Late January through mid-February, the almond orchards of Mallorca bloom across the interior of the island, from the plains around Sineu and Llubí north to the foothills of the Tramuntana. There are something like four million almond trees still standing, the surviving stock of a much larger planting that peaked in the late nineteenth century after the phylloxera blight ruined the vineyards. The blossoms are white or pink-tinged, on bare grey branches, the first sign of spring in the western Mediterranean. The petals fall fast. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Mallorca is the largest of the Balearic Islands, in the western Mediterranean off the east coast of Spain. The almond orchards are concentrated in the central plain, the Pla de Mallorca, with significant plantings around the towns of Sineu, Llubí, Santa Maria, and the foothills of the Serra de Tramuntana to the north-west. The Tramuntana range was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in 2011 for its terraced agriculture, dry-stone walls, and hydraulic engineering. Almonds were once the second pillar of the island's rural economy after olives, and the surviving orchards date in many cases to plantings begun in the 1870s and 1880s.
Bloom typically begins in the last week of January and runs through the first half of February, depending on elevation and the year's winter weather. The peak window is short, usually about two weeks at any given site. The Mallorca tourist board markets the period as the Festa de la Florida, with suggested drives through the central plain and the foothills of the Tramuntana. The variety mix on the island is largely native, with cultivars such as Pou de Felanitx, Vivot, and Verdereta still in the ground from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century plantings. Harvest is in August and September.
The mid-winter air in interior Mallorca is dry, cool, and clear in the bloom window, with daytime temperatures in the low to mid teens Celsius and frost at night in the higher orchards toward Selva and Caimari. The orchards are typically open ground with no fences, planted in loose grids on red clay soil between dry-stone walls. Sheep often graze the cover crop between the rows. The Tramuntana ridge runs north-west, often capped with cloud while the orchards in the plain are in full sun. There are roughly four million almond trees still in cultivation on the island.
