Haleakala Silversword Maui Ceramic Art Tile
— — silver against the cinder, the years before the bloom.
Not only on a wall.
“A plant that lives nowhere else. The Haleakalā silversword (ʻāhinahina in Hawaiian) grows above 6,900 feet on the slopes of the volcano, its silver hairs catching what little water comes through the cloud layer. Most rosettes spend twenty to fifty years building toward a single bloom: a stalk taller than a person, hundreds of small maroon flowers. Then the plant dies. There used to be tens of thousands. Goats and souvenir hunters took most by the 1920s. After the park fenced out the goats, the count climbed back to roughly sixty-five thousand. Warmer, drier years have begun to thin it again.
Haleakala Silversword Maui Ceramic Art Tile, 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.
The place, in three passes.
Haleakalā is a 10,023-foot shield volcano that forms the eastern three-quarters of the island of Maui. Its summit caldera, roughly seven miles across, sits above the trade-wind cloud layer at 3,055 metres and supports a small alpine desert and a suite of plants endemic to its slopes. The Haleakalā silversword (Argyroxiphium sandwicense subsp. macrocephalum) lives only here, on the upper slopes between about 6,900 and 9,800 feet. Most are found inside Haleakalā National Park, which the National Park Service administers from the visitor centre near Puʻu ʻUlaʻula, the summit cone. The park is reached by the Haleakalā Crater Road from Kahului, a thirty-eight-mile drive that climbs from sea level to the rim in under two hours.
The silversword's bloom is a once-in-a-lifetime event. After spending anywhere from three to ninety years as a silver rosette of curved leaves, the plant sends up a flowering stalk that can exceed two metres and bears between one hundred and six hundred maroon-and-yellow composite heads. Bloom typically peaks between June and October, with most stalks flowering in July and August. Each rosette is monocarpic, dying within weeks of releasing seed. The park's count of mature plants recovered from fewer than four thousand in 1927 to roughly sixty-five thousand in the 1990s, then began to decline; the U.S. Geological Survey links the drop to warmer, drier conditions in the alpine zone since 1989.
Haleakalā National Park charges a $30 vehicle entrance fee, valid for three days, and a separate timed reservation is required for any vehicle entering the summit district between 3 a.m. and 7 a.m. for sunrise viewing. The Haleakalā Visitor Center sits at 9,740 feet near the rim of the caldera; the road continues another two miles to Puʻu ʻUlaʻula at 10,023 feet. Silverswords are visible from the parking areas and along the Pa Kaʻoao and Sliding Sands trails. Visitors are asked not to step within fifteen feet of any plant; the shallow root system extends well beyond the silver rosette and is easily damaged by foot traffic.