There is much for me to miss about the lands of my childhood, including what were then, at least, the gloriously cloudy days and steady snows of winter. One thing I don’t miss is the mosquitoes of summer, of course, but I do sometimes dream about being able to run barefoot through lush green grass untroubled by the possibility of punctures by goathead stickers. And I miss our orchard, our thickets, our fruit trees, the wild berries.
A seasonal phenomenon that I miss is one that, then and there, at least, usually occurred a few months down the road, and usually for only the briefest of moments: awakening one morning to plants, trees, flowers long since blooming, already bearing fruit, covered by a fragile dusting of crystalline white.
We had an apple orchard, a good-sized one, behind the house stretching toward the north boundary of our land. Next to it went the garden in summer, with corn, beans, pumpkins, other squash, miscellaneous vegetables. Wild strawberries grew scattershot across the land, arising here, poking up there, but what hedged the back yard from the orchard was a beautiful, wonderful, truly thick thicket of a raspberry patch — red and black raspberries alike, crunchy with seeds, mouth-wateringly tart and yet so sweet you could eat them straight off the vine, running the length of the orchard and then some, all the way to the dirt road.
And then, right outside the house on the northwest corner, was a single cherry tree.
It was not particularly large, but the branches were solid enough to scrape the corner of the house and the window there during storms. It was mostly a plain and unassuming tree for much of the year, but when it fruited . . . big, dark, garnet-colored cherries, the kind that, like the wild raspberries, make your mouth water from the tart, tangy sweetness.
When I look at garnet cabochons, I see those cherries.
We’ve looked at garnet here before — a number of times, in fact. It’s a stone of incredible beauty and surprising diversity, manifesting in multiple “species” and colors. As I wrote last year:
Garnet is a mineral classified as a “neosilicate” — or, more accurately, a group of minerals, which geologists and gemologists subdivide into “species.” There are six major species, which are divided into two related groups: almandine, pyrope, and spessartite in one; andradite, grossular, and uvarovite in the other.
Most of what we think of today as “garnet” — i.e., stones in the deep red color shown above — come from the almandine and pyrope species. But garnet actually comes in a variety of colors across the spectrum, pinks and oranges and reds and purples, deepening all the way to black; golden yellows and browns and brilliant greens; and even a transparent icy-looking shade. But the rarest of garnets are the blue garnets, found largely in . . . where else? Madagascar. And Madagascar is already being violated enough for its rare species of all types; the blue garnets should stay in the ground there, thank you. Since the discovery of the first blue garnet there some 20 years ago, they have also been found in parts of Africa, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. And most are not strictly “blue”; they are called “color-changing” garnets, because they appear blue to green in natural light, but purplish in incandescent light. [Some of the other forms and colors of garnet change color under different forms of light, as well.] There are also “star garnets” (think star sapphires), but they are extraordinarily rare, and often not well-delineated in the stone, making them less effective for use in jewelry.
Depending on species, source location, and gemological quality, garnet can range in value from next to nothing to the very expensive. Some garnet is not useable for gemstone and jewelry purposes at all, but does have industrial uses: It’s an effective sanding substance, and is used in industrial abrasives and high-pressure washes. For gemological uses, the types, quality, color, and cost are all widely variable.
Wings has used garnet throughout his career as a silversmith — most often as an accent stone, but occasionally, as shown in the photo at the top of this post, as the focal point of a piece. The one constant is that they are always red garnets, of good quality within their particular classification (which is to say, gem-grade stone that has a moderately high cost, but not the astronomical value of a Madagascar blue garnet).
As noted above, almandine and pyrope provide most the garnets typically used in jewelry-making. Almandine garnet tends, overall, to be of low gemological quality; the surface of the stone is opaque, more putty-like, and the reddish color is often only a hint in what looks like a largely gray stone. There are some, however, that are brilliant reds with a translucent quality that makes them useful for gemwork. Pyrope, on the other hand, tends toward translucence and it comes in a large, subtly-different range of reds, with relatively few inclusions in most of the source stone. Inclusions can be matrix, water, or, frankly, air — space from cracks created by matrix or pressure — and unlike with turquoise, are generally regarded as flaws in gemstones like garnet. there is also a subspecies of a sort in this category, found frequently in the American South: rhodolite, which ranges from light pink to a moderate violet-purple shade. It’s sold as “rhodolite,” but is part of the garnet family.
Aside from the family of red stones that are what come to mind when most people think of garnet (and those with purely industrial uses), it is perhaps easiest to find the green form. Still, that’s much more rare in the world of gemstone jewelry; most of what the average dealer sells, and the average jeweler buys and uses, falls somewhere along the red spectrum. The others, however, are beautiful, as I noted earlier:
The andradite form of garnet tends to be more expensive; it produces rarer colors and quality, including a topaz yellow shade, greens that run the gamut from subdued pale greens to fiery emerald, and even black. The uvarovite form also produces greens, and the crystalline form can be electrifying in effect. Greens also appear in the grossular garnet form, which tends to be multicolored and opaque, but is nonetheless finding its own niche in jewelry.
When I say “opaque,” I refer specifically to appearance at first glance, with the naked eye. As we’ll see just below, opacity is a bit of a mirage.
With green garnets, the labels can get confusing. You will sometimes see green garnets labeled simply as “grossular” garnets, which may be accurate (or not, depending on the stone to which the label happens to be applied); as “green grossular” garnets, which is accurate; or as “hydrogrossular” garnets, which generally is not. The addition of the term “grossular” refers to the inclusions found in the particular stone, and in the green grossular form of garnet, they appear as crystalline inclusions, sometimes described as looking like “rods” or “needles,” but with no alteration to the overall color of the stone, which is translucent and tends to range from olive to lime to emerald green.
“Hydrogrossular” garnets, on the other hand, have matrix inclusions that are granular in structure, and often appear on the reddish end of the spectrum; there is nothing about them that inheres to the green variety. Key here is that while the stone still possesses translucence, a quality visible when held to the light, it appears at first glance to be more opaque, thanks to the granular nature of the matrix.
Most Native smiths and jewelers, however, choose garnet for its “red” identity. As I’ve noted before:
As some stones and natural substances like coral become increasingly rare, attention is turning in the gemological community to other stones that used to be dismissed as lacking in value. Such is the case with some of the other forms of garnet. New red coral (which we will cover a later date) is virtually nonexistent; carnelian and amber are increasingly expensive and hard to find, and much of what’s out there at low prices is made in laboratories. The spessartite form of garnet, however, yields a lovely orangey to orange-red stone that provides a good substitute for coral, carnelian, or amber in jewelry-making. As a result, of course, it is now being mined with increasing frequency.
We’ve talked about the scarcity of genuine coral many times already. It has a long and time-honored history as an integral part of Native jewelry, particularly here in the Southwest. But like the rest of the natural world, anthropogenic environmental change means that adaptation is now required of our artisans, as well. And so garnet becomes a substitute for a traditional material in a similar color, one that is able, in some ways, to pick up the threads of tradition and reweave them into a symbolic whole similar to those of old.
Of course, “tradition” and “symbolism” are widely variable concepts, even among and within our diverse peoples. When the outside world brings its own ideas of symbolism to bear, what a stone of a given color means to creator and wearer may be two very different things, and yet both may be weighted with great significance for each. We’ve looked at the symbolic motifs attached to the stone, too:
Because garnet is generally conceived as being red, it’s often regarded as a “woman’s stone,” since many New Age and similar traditions make the association of red with blood and blood with women. It stems, in part, at least, from the associations with menstruation and childbirth.
But other traditions, older traditions, don’t necessarily compartmentalize stones by gender. The color red has numerous associations for our peoples, practical, artistic, spiritual. In many traditions, it’s a color of one of the Four Sacred Directions, though which direction varies widely among tribal nations. it can be associated with specific natural elements or with spirit beings. And it’s often used by men as well as women in traditional face and body paint; in markings for warriors and their horses; in traditional dress and the bindings of feather shafts; in art and adornment of nearly every conceivable form. And, of course, it’s in the very word given to the color of our skin, a word we’ve long since adopted and reclaimed as an identifier of our own. When Native artists use colored stones as a medium by which to translate the symbolism of color, garnet is often a popular choice to represent “Red.”
To me, the stone carries different meaning in different contexts. I see readily the motif of fire that runs through the descriptions and manifestations of the two pieces pictured above, both of which played a role in Wings’s one-man show last year. In these two cuffs, it becomes something starkly dichotomous, an elemental contrast between heat and cold, fire and ice, and yet somehow, to me, it seems to embody both elements — as though its counterpoint to the cool silver metal and snowflake imagery of the obsidian (itself a stone of fire) merge and meld until every element of each piece contains both characteristics. The garnets warm the metal and the other stones, which in turn render the red stones themselves an almost icy heat. Ice can burn, after all (and heat “freeze,” in the sense of cauterization).
But to me, one of the most significant aspects of the garnets that Wings uses in his work has nothing to do with fire at all. For someone like me, a synesthete, the range of color is as salient a quality as anything else. And the garnets he chooses are, upon close inspection, widely variable in shade. These reds, from a translucent magenta-like hue with pink and purple undertones to a clear deep scarlet to a red so dark that it resembles jet . . . all of these, to me, are the very embodiment of our people, and specifically, of we women. Warm, fiery, nurturing, strong, deeply alive, with all of the power and vitality of the elements, tempered by the winds of experience.
And garnets also remind me of home: of the life-sustaining sweetness of the cherries with which our people have been blessed, and on which we have survived, since time immemorial. Some are like the one shown in the small cuff at the very top (and like those in my beloved water bird earrings) — just reaching ripeness, still slightly pinkish and beautifully clear. Others are like those on the cuff at the center — now dark red and fully ripe, perfect for picking and eating straight off the tree. Still others, like those shown in my Warrior Woman, immediately above, are the black cherries — dark, strong, intensely flavored, tangy and sweet in equal measure.
And on a day when I look out the window on a foot of snow, with more coming out of a dove-white sky, it almost feels like I am back home, looking out the northwest window at the cherries in the snow.
~ Aji
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