Sundarbans National Park
— — a forest the tide walks through twice a day.
Not only on a wall.
“The largest mangrove forest on earth, draped across the seaward edge of the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta. The Indian portion alone covers more than 4,000 square kilometres, half land and half tidal channel. Royal Bengal tigers move through the salt forest at low tide, leaving prints the next tide erases. Boats are the only way in. From the deck of a launch, the forest reads quiet until it doesn't.
Sundarbans National Park, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Sundarbans National Park lies in the southern delta of West Bengal, India, at the meeting of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna rivers with the Bay of Bengal. The park covers 1,330 square kilometres at the core of a much larger 10,000-square-kilometre tidal forest shared with neighbouring Bangladesh. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 1987. The whole system is governed by the daily ebb and flood of brackish water through hundreds of named and unnamed creeks running between low islands of silt and root.
The Sundarbans is shaped by two tidal cycles a day, with the saltwater wedge pushing tens of kilometres inland and retreating again on the ebb. The dominant mangrove species, the sundari tree (Heritiera fomes), gives the forest its name. Salinity gradients move with the monsoon, freshening in the wet season and concentrating in the dry. Cyclones from the Bay of Bengal, including 2009's Aila and 2020's Amphan, periodically reshape the channels. The whole system functions as a natural barrier against storm surge.
There are no roads inside the park. Access is by motor launch from Godkhali jetty, about three and a half hours by road from Kolkata. Visitors travel with armed forest guards and stop at the watchtowers at Sajnekhali, Sudhanyakhali, and Dobanki. The forest reading is mostly auditory: spotted deer alarm calls, the splash of mudskippers, the cough of a langur. Tigers are heard far more often than seen. Roughly 100 tigers move through the Indian Sundarbans, the only tiger population that regularly swims tidal channels.