Last weekend I drove out to the desert for a really fascinating flea market/mineral show/RV rumble which – as advertised – was a rockhound’s paradise indeed! Wow! I’m not an authority (yet!) on grading minerals and rocks and meteors and 50 million-year-old fossils but my relative ignorance made me no less impressed with stall after stall of the beautiful natural creations. Color and geometry catch my eye so I was pretty much in heaven sifting through the endless strings of turquoise, malachite, quartz, tourmaline, etc., etc., etc. (I think this calls for a few gemology classes!)
I had just purchased a strand of earthy-colored squares to use in a future mosaic project when I came across one of the most AMAZING things I have ever seen… a display of enormous pine cones. Some of them were over two feet long! A very nice couple who hailed from Northern California explained to me (a southern Californian) that they were Sugar Pine Cones from the Sugar Pine Tree which grows in Northern California and Oregon at elevations above 35,000 feet and drops their cones every three or four years.
I thus made my second purchase of the day, the above cone. I particularly like its colossal-ness and the way it hearkens to an almost Jurassic era of lush nature and the way the pine scent is still infused in its bristles. The sugar pine, incidentally, is the largest species of pine and can grow to over 200 feet. Sugar Pines are important to the creation stories of the Achomawi people of Northern California.
Sugar Pine Cones are most commonly used for home decoration, craft projects and as fire starters. Blazes!
