Collection: Knotty Pine

Not a rose in sight.

Royal Albert produced Knotty Pine after 1962, through the late 1970s, on their classic Montrose shape with its scalloped edges and curled handles. The pattern is unlike almost anything else the pottery made: a central vignette of tall pine trees reflected in still water, with a border that simulates pine bark, warm amber and tan tones, the grain running true, and painted pine cones placed at intervals around the edge. Gold trim finishes the rim. That's the whole composition. It doesn't need anything more.

It's an outlier in the Royal Albert catalogue, which spent most of its century devoted to garden florals and English roses. Knotty Pine found its audience anyway, particularly across Canada and the Pacific Northwest, where pine country wasn't a design theme but a way of life. Sets were used, kept, passed along. They show up now at estate sales in Alberta and British Columbia with a particular frequency, which says something about where they were loved.

Each pendant begins with a carefully chosen fragment of genuine Royal Albert Knotty Pine china, selected for the way the bark falls, the way the pine trees sit in the landscape, the particular piece of forest captured in that one cut. Set into a hypoallergenic aluminum frame, finished in gold or silver, with a hand-formed wire bale at the top. No two are the same. They can't be.

Wearing one is a quiet thing. A piece of Canadian landscape, a long walk in the woods made small enough to carry. Browse the Knotty Pine collection and find the one that's yours.