Palouse rolling wheat fields
— hills the wind built and the wheat keeps.
Not only on a wall.
“The rolling wheat country of southeast Washington and northern Idaho. The hills look like waves because they were made by wind: windblown silt called loess, piled across the basalt over tens of thousands of years, in places more than two hundred feet deep. The fields turn through the year. Wheat goes in soft green in May, ripens to a long gold in July, comes off in August and leaves a corduroy of stubble. The view most photographers know comes from Steptoe Butte, a quartzite knob that rises above the surrounding farms at 3,612 feet, looking west into Whitman County.
Palouse rolling wheat fields, 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.
The Palouse is a region of roughly three thousand square miles spanning southeast Washington and northern Idaho, bounded loosely by Spokane to the north, the Snake River to the south, Pullman and Moscow at the centre, and the Channeled Scablands to the west. Its rolling hills are dunes of loess, windblown glacial silt deposited atop the Columbia River Basalt during the Pleistocene, in places reaching depths of more than two hundred feet. The soil is among the most productive dryland wheat ground in North America. The hills' wave-like shapes follow the prevailing winds of the late ice age. Steptoe Butte, a 3,612-foot quartzite knob in Whitman County, is the canonical viewpoint.
The Palouse is a photographer's country because the light works on the contours. Long oblique light at the start and end of the day rakes across the hills and turns each one into a sculpted form, every fold and shadow visible. Summer evenings stretch past nine at this northern latitude, and the dust raised by the harvest catches the gold of the low sun. Steptoe Butte, an isolated quartzite outlier rising 3,612 feet from the surrounding farms, provides the elevation that makes the photographs work. The butte was donated to Washington State Parks in 1946 by Virgil McCroskey, who also founded the neighbouring Idaho park on Mineral Mountain.
The agricultural year on the Palouse runs through four distinct visual seasons. Winter wheat goes into the ground in autumn and overwinters under occasional snow. Spring greens the hills from late April through early June, when the fields read as soft and saturated. Ripening turns them gold by mid-July. Harvest runs from late July through August, leaving alternating bands of stubble and tilled earth that hold their corduroy patterns into autumn. The fallow rotations and the contour ploughing along the slopes give the Palouse its layered look from above. The peak photography window is the first three weeks of June and the last two of July.