Creation of furniture made from Arizona petrified wood
Noble material
Traditional craftsmanship
Unique design
High-quality finishes
Petrified wood, a noble and ancient material
About 200 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs, conifers appeared. One of the very first to reproduce was the ARAUCARIA, a tree 30 to 40 meters tall, better known as the “monkey’s despair.”
America had just detached itself from the African continent and was beginning its drift toward the northwest. Arizona was still in the tropics, bathed in a hot, humid climate.
Some of these large trees, felled by natural phenomena, remained buried in swamps for thousands of years. At that time, volcanic activity was frequent and intense. Large quantities of ash, rich in mineral salts, ejected by volcanoes, settled in the swamps where these large conifers lay.
The silica present in the ash slowly dissolved in the water, molecule by molecule, in order to penetrate each cell of the wood. This natural phenomenon took place over several thousand years while preserving the original structure of the log.
The rich colors found in these fossilized trees are due to the various oxides present in the ground, particularly iron oxide for red, manganese oxide for black, and sulfur for yellow. Depending on the levels of these different oxides in the soil, the color palette changes in these trees.
Petrified wood, a natural material
Today, 95% of the territory is protected by a national park called the “Petrified Forest.” It is strictly forbidden to prospect for and collect petrified wood in the park. Outside of this national park, there is private land where prospecting and extraction are permitted and controlled.
We prospect at a depth of 5 to 10 meters to extract pieces of logs 1 to 3 meters in length. Only a few pieces of logs are extracted each year. On site, we carry out a very rigorous selection process, and only 1 or 2 logs of exceptional quality will be shipped to France and worked on in our workshop.
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