Petrified Wood, a customer favorite

We love petrified wood and carry a carefully curated and choose selection of bookends, table tops, bowls and slices (should you be looking, but not seeing what you want please message us). 

Petrified wood is made up of almost solid quartz.  The colors are produced by impurities in the quartz, such as iron, carbon, & manganese. It's name is from Greek root petro meaning "rock" or "stone”. It is the result of tree or tree-like plants having completely transitioned to stone by the process of  permineralization. All the organic materials have been replaced completely by minerals, including silica dissolved from volcanic ash, absorbed into the porous wood over thousands of years crystallized within the cellular structure.

About Coloration and Preservation: The colors in the wood are part of the preservation process that happens naturally.  It takes the right mineralization process to create the colors in each piece of petrified wood.

The trees washed into ancient river systems, mud flows or were covered in volcanic ash and rapidly buried by sediment and debris, also carried in the water.  Oxygen was cut off and decay slowed to a process that would now take centuries.

Red: Iron dissolves in ground water when no oxygen is present, the the ground water becomes re-oxygenated as it moves though the tree trunks causing oxygen to bond with the iron. The iron then precipitates to produce a solid form of iron called hematite. This hematite is then incorporated into the log's cell structure. The soluble iron in ground water becomes oxidized into a solid form when it comes in contact with air, causing a reddish stain.

Yellow, Brown and Orange: These colors are produced by the presence of goethite, a hydrated iron oxide that is derived by weathering from iron bearing minerals. 

White: Produced by pure silica. Since silicon, and oxygen,  are the two most abundant elements in the earth's crust. silica, referred to scientifically as silicon dioxide, occurs most commonly as quartz. Quartz is the principal element of glass. Petrified wood, also referred to as agatized wood, is a common illustration of a quartz pseudomorph - wood is slowly replaced, by silica, until not a trace of the original material remains.

Black: Organic carbon or pyrite, the most abundant and widespread sulfide mineral.

Blue: chalcedony, chrysocolla  but also cobalt and silica produce blues from pale to deeper shades.

Green: Copper and cobalt, Pink: Manganese