Big Meadows
— the field the mountain forgot to grow over.
Not only on a wall.
Big Meadows, 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 wide grassy clearing at Mile 51 on Skyline Drive, near the spine of the Blue Ridge. Whitetail deer step out at dusk; black bears work the blueberry edge in August. The meadow is held open by mowing and prescribed fire, the way the Civilian Conservation Corps found it in the 1930s. Mountain wind moves the grass and nothing in particular hurries.
The place, in three passes.
Big Meadows is a 150-acre upland clearing at Mile 51 of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, at roughly 3,500 feet of elevation. It is the largest open meadow in the park, surrounded by oak and hickory forest on the Blue Ridge crest. The meadow holds a lodge, a campground, a wayside, and the Byrd Visitor Center, named for Senator Harry F. Byrd. President Hoover's Rapidan Camp lies a short hike below. The National Park Service maintains the opening by periodic mowing and prescribed fire to prevent forest succession from closing it in.
The meadow runs through a long year. Spring brings bloodroot, trillium, and lady's slipper at the forest edge in April and May. Summer turns the field to milkweed, black-eyed Susan, and goldenrod from June through September, with peak wildflower bloom in late July. Wineberries and lowbush blueberries ripen in August and black bears feed openly along the margins. October colour reaches the surrounding ridges by mid-month. Winter brings snow and silence; Skyline Drive often closes between the meadow and Thornton Gap.
At 3,500 feet the air carries the Blue Ridge climate, cooler by roughly ten degrees than the Shenandoah Valley below, with afternoon clouds that pile up against the ridge and break into thunderstorms. Visibility ranges widely: the meadow's edge can sit inside a low cloud while the parking lot at the lodge stays dry. Dawn frosts arrive by late September. The thin cool air explains the upland plant community, which includes species more common to the southern Appalachians than to the Piedmont a thousand feet below.
