Santa Clara Valley
— — the valley where orchards became code.
Not only on a wall.
“The valley once called the Valley of Heart's Delight, when apricot, prune, and cherry orchards covered the floor from San Jose north to Palo Alto. By the 1970s the orchards had given way to chip fabs and quiet office parks. The hills still look the way they always have — gold most of the year, green for six weeks in spring. The shape of the land is older than what got built on it.
Santa Clara Valley, 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.
Santa Clara Valley runs roughly 50 kilometres south of San Francisco Bay, hemmed by the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and the Diablo Range to the east. San Jose, at the southern end, is California's third-largest city. Until the mid-twentieth century the valley floor was the largest fruit-producing region in the world. Today the same alluvial flats hold Apple, Google, Intel, and Nvidia. Spanish settlers named the valley for Mission Santa Clara de Asís, founded in 1777 along the Guadalupe River.
The valley's Mediterranean climate runs dry from May through October and wet from November through April, averaging about 380 millimetres of rain in San Jose. February brings the orchard bloom — what remains of it, in heritage groves around the Sunnyvale Heritage Park Orchard and the Guadalupe-Coyote bottomlands. April and May are hill-green months. By August the grass is the colour of straw. The cycle is the same one Ohlone families read for thousands of years before the missions, and the same one the orchardists kept by.
On clear winter mornings the valley fills with cold air pooled against the Santa Cruz Mountains, sometimes capped by tule fog that burns off by mid-morning. Summer afternoons pull the marine layer through the Golden Gate and over the ridges above Skyline. Lick Observatory sits at 1,283 metres on Mount Hamilton above the valley's east side, one of the first permanently occupied mountaintop observatories. Light pollution from the floor has dimmed its skies since the 1970s, but the air still clears north toward dusk.