How It Works: Frostproof Terracotta

It’s hard to believe that it is already Fall. In California, leaves don’t change much in a drought, no matter what time of year. But as another October becomes a thing of the past, much of the country can already feel the promise of winter. So let’s talk about frostproof terracotta.

Many of you live and work in places that freeze, and much has been said, both by homeowners and garden designers about the freeze/thaw capability of ceramic plant containers. Remember that ‘clay’ is the earthen material, ‘ceramic’ is the clay when it has been fired. Terracotta is low fire red clay found all over the world. There are low fire clay bodies, and high fire clay bodies. Low fire is also referred to as earthenware, high fire is stoneware. Once clay is fired it becomes ceramic no matter what temperature it is fired to. But that doesn’t mean it is mature. I want to introduce you to two new key words: “vitrify” and “absorption.”

Every clay, whether earthenware or stoneware, has an optimum maturation point when fired. When this point is reached, the clay is “vitrified.” When clay becomes vitreous, it means that all the different ingredients in the clay have melted and bonded together to form a mature, very strong, “ceramic.” If a clay is over-fired it becomes flakey and worthless. If a clay is under-fired (like many of the pottery containers that are called “terracotta”) it is weak and porous and highly susceptible to cracking, even without being frozen. So when we talk about frostproof ceramic or terracotta, interestingly enough, we have to talk about fire first. In ceramics it always, always, always, comes back to the fire.

The key equation: the more vitrified, the less absorption. Did you catch that? Absorption yields expansion/contraction and hence cracking, during a freeze/thaw cycle. That’s basically it. You’ve got clay, you’ve got fire, you’ve got maturation/vitrification, and you’ve got frostproof ceramic. Or, more plainly put, if a ceramic vessel is not fired to its target temperature, it will die an easy death no matter what the weather is doing.  But if it will last longer than you do.  Just think about that for a moment.

Here is what you can do when you are ready to purchase frostproof ceramic containers:

1) Research the manufacturer’s credibility. If you are buying real, frostproof ware, know where it comes from and how it was fired, and get something on paper, like a warranty.

2) Protect your investment! Do not add moisture to a vessel that you know is going to freeze. And if you are going to take the time to cover the plants, take the time to cover the container too. Start to think of the ceramics as a living, breathing, expanding and contracting entity, just like the plant that it holds.

3) IMMEDIATELY call Eye of the Day. They have been selling frostproof terracotta for more than fifteen are not only knowledgeable, but relatively good looking and congenial, and carry the best frostproof terracotta on the market (guaranteed to withstand temperatures down to minus 15° F).

4) Move to California!

In late Spring the opportunity to sell a complete container of Terrecotte San Rocco came our way.  Kitchell Construction was managing the building and development of a large estate in the greater Denver area and because of Eye of the Day’s past and current collaborations with them, we were recommended by their Santa Barbara team.

Everyone knows it snows at a mile high in the sky and when you’re building a large Mediterranean style house and need frost-proof terracotta pottery, who do you call? Sound the trumpets please: Eye of the Day, of course. As an authority on clay, we were able to help them select a large and diverse range of Italian terracotta pottery made from Galestro clay which comes with a ten-year warranty to minus 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Many people, including design professionals, incorrectly refer to this Italian clay as “Impruneta,” a village commune near Florence, Italy.

It has been 35 years since I was last in Denver, Colorado—what a vibrant and exciting place. I arrived to meet the container of our great Italian terracotta pottery for the project and took public transportation into the city center for far less than a shuttle, cab, or using Über. Two stops after stepping on the bus, I stepped off at the new, super organized terminal right in downtown, not far from the ballpark where the Rockies play. Across the street I stepped on the free Mall Shuttle, which took me to the other end of 17th Street and dropped me off outside the Sheraton Hotel.  Because I got there a day before the container was being delivered from the port in Houston, I walked the downtown, my pedometer said almost seven and a half miles in a day and a half which is about what I walk each day at the store.

The mixture of old and new architecture is very simpatico in Denver. I’ll bet there are dozens of brick buildings that are made from Gladding McBean bricks and they look even more beautiful today almost a hundred years later.

The development of downtown Denver looks more like Manhattan than Los Angeles with multiple high-rise residential buildings and projects throughout the city. Gleaming steel and glass buildings shadowing older low-rise buildings like a six-foot grandson might put his arm around his grandpa. They go together well in Denver. The ballpark on one side of downtown and Mile High Stadium on the other with an extreme amount and variety of great microbrews in between.

Here’s to being a Mile High!

Inside the Pieces: Why We Love Authentic Pottery
Baked Earth series with Scott Semple

Hello to all and nice to be here again. It’s a classic Fall morning here on the Central Coast. I am currently walking around the Eye of the Day showroom, sipping Mint tea, trying to keep Shorty the dog at bay and writing to an enthusiastic yet invisible audience about my favorite messy, muddy medium: clay.

So, I’ve been thinking about this word “authentic.”

The first time I stepped foot into this showroom, I’m pretty sure what came out of my mouth was, “Wow, finally, authentic pieces.” I feel blessed to have traveled a good part of the world. I have not only seen, but intentionally sought out traditional pottery in villages from the foothills of Guatemala to Pokhara Nepal, from the backside of Cuba, to the historic potteries of Crete and mainland Greece. Knowing a thing or two about pottery and what it takes to build large format ceramic vessels, I walk in to Eye of the Day and immediately I’m transported to the smell of Turkish coffee in the Mediterranean, or the intense glow of a Native American dung firing.

This showroom is the gathering place of authenticity. You can look down inside these big pots and see what it took to make them, the marks that the sponge leaves while it spins on the wheel, the throw lines, and where sections of the piece were connected and not only joined, but adorned. The Greek ware in particular is notorious for actually celebrating the area on a vessel, like this one, where sections of spun clay were joined together to make a much larger form. I can see handles on pots that at first glance seem just like handles but are actually an integral part of how the artist moves the piece from the kiln to the customer. Or all these pots that have tool marks inside them from popping the occasional, yet inevitable air bubble. It’s all there, inside the pieces.

I’m talking about form—the mark of what it took to create the form, the container, not the decoration or the way the fire has licked it here or there on the surface. I tell my students almost daily, there is a form and there is a surface. Learn to treat each as a separate component, and you will be successful in clay. The form by itself should stand up to serious critique.

The work for sale at Eye of the Day is authentic. Not overly decorated or gaudy, not borrowed to look like it’s from some other culture. It is Authentic Classicism, coming from some of the few places in the world that are still producing wares that are handmade, timeless classical forms. We end up longing for these pieces, like touchstones from a place and time in history.

My last stop on the showroom tour has brought me to the Italian terracotta. Eye of the Day has the largest collection of authentic Italian terracotta containers from Terrecotte San Rocco in the entire country. There is so much handmade information in these vessels, I could talk and talk about it (as you probably guessed). But for now, I promise to revisit this topic of Italian Terrecotte San Rocco. How it is built, where the clay comes from, why it is frost resistant and more.

But until then, get to know what is inside a vessel, not just its outer reveal.
See you next month!

In February of 1998 our lives were changed forever by El Niño. Eye of the Day was in its infancy, just two and a half years old and we became a statistic as the worst damaged business in Santa Barbara County. The federal government declared a disaster area and we lost nearly everything. But…what we didn’t know was that our journey was about to take us on a brilliant detour.

From its inception, the Eye of the Day plan was to sell pottery, fountains, statuary and other garden products. There were a lot of nurseries but not many focusing on accouterments for the garden. We began by selling wine barrel planters, Mexican pottery, American made concrete fountains, benches, bird baths and lots of colorful pots. At Christmas we sold only the Noble Fir. But then the forces of nature randomly decided to take us out.

There is a saying that when a door closes a window opens; I was looking for a window and it turned out to be FEMA. With a new FEMA loan and a lot of help from friends, Eye of the Day quickly found a new home in a bigger market, picked ourselves up off the very wet pavement and began again.

After we opened our doors in our new (and current) location in the small beach town of Carpinteria, we sensed a great opportunity to grow in a way that the pre-disaster Eye of the Day would not have been able to fulfill. Our business model was limited and we needed to think bigger, so we decided that the gift shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Atlanta just didn’t provide what we needed anymore. It makes me laugh when I remember how quickly my wife, Suzi, agreed that we needed to go to Paris and check out the gift show there. We didn’t realize at the time just how prescient we were.

The first day of the show was the ultimate shopping experience but only if you were buying at least ten of everything. Included was an area for outdoor garden decor and when we walked into Francesco del Re’s booth, I knew I had found something special:  the finest handmade terracotta pottery on planet Earth. His containers were classics and many were models of forms and shapes still in service after hundreds of years, including pots or “vasi”, urns and amphorae adorning villas and palaces throughout Europe. Francesco’s display screamed CLASSIC ITALIAN TERRACOTTA to me. I vowed right then that Eye of the Day would sell Francesco del Re, just as soon as I figured out how I could afford a container.

The following year we returned to Europe, this time to Italy. Something drives me to wander and explore and I knew Francesco del Re was somewhere around Florence and I knew I would find him. I scoured the small, famous hill town of Impruneta, walking into some fabulous artisan workshops. No one knew who and where FDR was, but I learned later that in Italy, few are willing to promote someone else and everyone in that famous commune was challenged by him. The hunt was on. I didn’t travel in order to give up. It was hard work, but over our excellent lunch in Greve, the proprietor of the restaurant told me how to find the factory. By the way, we selected the restaurant for lunch because there was a pair of classic Francesco del Re Vaso Lessona urns at the front door.

I have returned to the FDR factory every year for the last sixteen years. This May I flew there for three days to help load a forty-foot container and to see Signora Elettra Brancollini, Francesco’s partner and sculptor. Sadly, our friend Signore del Re passed away two years ago, but his classics will live on for centuries in our gardens.

Debunking the Terracotta Mythos

The sun has yet to awaken, the moon just rose as a wink on the horizon, and the roosters are making that heinous sound only roosters can make, disturbing my first cup of coffee. Excuse me while I get that cup…

I want to talk about terracotta and it’s classification as an earthenware clay body. In ceramics we have hundreds of clays available to us, but all of them fit into one of two categories; earthenware, or stoneware. The difference between earthenware and stoneware is the maturation temperature, more easily termed as low or high fire clay. Low fire clays, having been fired to their maximum temperature (anywhere from 1800-2100°F) remain porous, while high fire clays vitrify when fired to higher temperatures ( 2200-2500° F). Since clays have many “ingredients” that are specific to their particular region, all clays have a different temperature range, but all can be classified as either low fire or high fire clay. Terracotta is technically a red earthenware, a low fire clay containing between 5 and 10% iron.

The meaning of “terracotta” is “baked earth” in Italian. Many people mistakenly use the words “terracotta” to describe anything made of clay from anywhere in the world, whether it is low or high fired. But as we are beginning to understand, terracotta is an actual clay body itself. It is abundant and utilitarian, can be found on every continent, and has been used for millennia to create irrigation piping, garden pots, and roof tile. It is best to speak of terracotta regionally, for example Mexican terracotta is essentially the same as Italian, but fired at a lower temperature. Another mistake about terracotta is that it is weak. In many places in the world it is hard to find even enough fuel to bring the fire up to the maturation temperature of the clay. If the temperature that matures (hardens, strengthens) the red clay is 1980°F, but the fire only reaches 1800°F, what happens? You have immature, under-baked pottery that is susceptible to cracking and doesn’t last very long. This happens all over the places simply don’t have the wood to do the firings, so they will use whatever they can to heat up their pots, resulting in a market in which one terracotta pot will last only two years and the one next to it will last two hundred… it just depends on the fire and country of origin.

The next time someone says to you that terracotta is junk and won’t stand the test of time, tell them in all confidence that it depends on where it is from and how it was fired. Then you can say that Eye of the Day garden design center only sells authentic Italian Galestro terracotta, mined for five generations from the same clay deposit, and fired to perfection. You can always depend on Eye of the Day for the highest quality in garden design products.

Hope this was informative. See you all next month!

Elements of Style: The Classic Mediterranean Garden

A classic Mediterranean style garden is typically low-maintenance, drought tolerant and perfect for a climate dry and hot in Summer and warm and moist in Winter. For those of us living in California, this seems a perfect fit. Traveling throughout the Mediterranean region, focused on the landscape and gardens, reminders of California are constant.

The defining characteristics of the Mediterranean style are:

• Focus on hardscapes, with very little or no lawn
• Citrus, olive trees, rosemary and lavender often planted in terracotta pots
• Fountains and water features are key. Water features became popular in the gardens of the Italian Renaissance. They reflect the garden and provide the relaxing elements of sight and sound.  Because of the scarcity of water in the Mediterranean,  many water elements offer a relief from the heat.
• Large and small terracotta pots and urns and statuary. Pottery in many forms has been a part of Mediterranean gardens since their origins in ancient Roman households. From intricate bas-relief to simple and plain, they are quintessential for a European garden.  Statues, urns and planters provide focal points and because their footprints are small, they are particularly useful in a small garden. The Greeks and Romans filled their pots with flowers to add color to their courtyards and pathways without depleting the water supply, or they used them to grow fruit trees that could be moved about  according to the outside temperature.  But pots were also used as beautiful objects on their own – a classic oil jar at the end of an allee, a row of terracotta pots topping a balustrade, or an urn crowning a pedestal.

You don’t have to live in Spain, Greece or Italy to reflect the siren call of the Mediterranean classic garden.  A few carefully chosen garden elements… an antique Greek pithari, a scattering of large terracotta pots and urns and a simple water feature will create your classic otium.  Being water conscious and embracing a rustic, muted look will go a long way toward making your space the place to be.