White-tailed deer in Monadnock hardwood
— — the small movement that turns the wood quiet.
Not only on a wall.
“A white-tailed doe in the maple and beech stands below Mount Monadnock, where the southern New Hampshire hardwoods turn the light yellow most of October. The deer are common here, common enough that people who walk the lower trails see them often and stop counting. The wood goes quiet around them. A flick of an ear, then nothing, then gone.
White-tailed deer in Monadnock hardwood, 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.
Mount Monadnock rises to 3,165 feet in southern New Hampshire, the high point of a rolling region of hardwood forest, lakes, and small towns that the state calls the Monadnock Region. The state park around the mountain covers about 1,000 acres; the broader landscape is mixed northern hardwood: sugar maple, American beech, and yellow birch, with white pine and eastern hemlock on the cooler slopes. The mountain has been climbed continuously since the 1820s and is among the most ascended peaks on Earth.
Below the summit cone the wood is closed in. Trails cross stone walls left over from the 19th-century farms that gave the land back to forest a hundred and fifty years ago. Sound carries strangely in hardwood: a footfall on dry leaves reads farther than it should, a falling acorn reads closer. The wood is full of deer, turkey, fisher, and the occasional black bear, but most days the loudest thing is a chickadee working the understory.
The hardwoods around Monadnock turn through October: sugar maples first and brightest, then beech to copper, then oak to russet. White-tailed deer are most visible at the edges of fields and along trails in the early hours of fall, when the rut begins and the bucks move more. Winter strips the wood to grey trunks against snow. Spring arrives slowly, and the understory greens in mid-May, after the last snowmelt comes off the mountain.