Overton Park Old Forest
— the forest the highway didn't get.
Not only on a wall.
Overton Park Old 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.
“A 126-acre stand of old-growth hardwoods inside a city park. Oak, hickory, beech, tulip poplar. Trees that were here before the surrounding streets. In 1971 a small group of neighbors took the federal government to the Supreme Court and stopped Interstate 40 from running through this ground. The forest stayed. Walk under a canopy that, in any other American city, was traded for a highway lane.
The place, in three passes.
The Old Forest is a 126-acre tract of old-growth hardwoods inside the 342 acres of Overton Park, in midtown Memphis. It is one of the few surviving urban old-growth forests in the United States, with canopy trees including white oak, shagbark hickory, American beech, and tulip poplar. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation designated it a State Natural Area in 2011. The Old Forest Loop, a roughly 1.6-mile paved path, traces the perimeter and connects to the Memphis Zoo and the Brooks Museum.
Step a hundred yards in from Poplar Avenue and the traffic falls away. The canopy is dense enough that the surrounding city seems to recede entirely inside the loop trail. Migrating warblers move through in spring and fall, drawn by the corridor along the Mississippi Flyway. Citizens to Preserve Overton Park, the neighborhood group that won the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case stopping Interstate 40, still patrols invasive species and reports illicit cutting along the trail edges to the park conservancy.
Overton Park lies along Poplar Avenue between East Parkway and McLean Boulevard, about three miles east of downtown Memphis. The Old Forest entrance most visitors use sits near the Brooks Museum lot off North Parkway. The loop is open from sunrise to sunset, free, dogs permitted on leash. The Overton Park Conservancy runs guided walks on weekend mornings in spring, when wildflowers including bloodroot and trillium bloom along the trail. Bicycles are not allowed inside the State Natural Area; the perimeter has separate cycling paths.
