Cicatrix Pulchra

Why this one exists

Most of my diamond willow comes off the banks of the Assiniboine near Elie, harvested as deadfall. I do not take living trees, only what the river country has already dropped, and this piece is one of those. Carvers usually strip the bark out of the diamonds to show the orange underneath. I go the other way. I leave the wild cavities exactly as the tree healed them, then carve the wood around them silky smooth, so the two textures play off each other.

I never decide what a diamond willow piece will look like. The position of the diamonds decides for me. By this point I have carved maybe a hundred diamond willow vases and no two have ever come out the same. This one is the largest I have ever been able to make, for the simple reason that thick diamond willow is very hard to find. Finished with my beeswax blend. Ideal for dried flowers, for obvious reasons.

It stood here

I found this tree from the air. I was shooting an acreage just outside near Elie for a real estate listing, and while the drone was up I spotted a wood pile you could see from altitude: thirty feet by sixty, a dozen feet tall, everything the owner had salvaged after a tornado took his trees down. In that pile was willow. I asked, and drove home with three pieces. Sometimes the camera finds the wood. The pin marks near Elie's edge; the acreage itself stays private.

Every side of it