Olive Wood Live Edge Clock
This tree was already old when Rome was young.
The olive tree does not hurry. It has no reason to. Fossil evidence places its ancestors in the Mediterranean basin twenty million years ago, and the tree itself has been cultivated by human hands since at least 4,000 BC — pressed for its oil, woven into victory crowns, planted in groves that outlasted empires. There are olive trees still bearing fruit in the hills of Greece and the Holy Land that were alive during the Bronze Age. The wood they produce carries all of that history inside it — in its density, its fine texture, and in the grain, which does not run straight like a disciplined timber but swirls and eddies and doubles back on itself, as if the tree spent centuries deciding which way to grow and couldn't quite settle on an answer.
This clock was made from a live-edge olive wood slab — meaning the natural edge of the tree was preserved rather than cut away. The live edge movement was given its modern form in the 1940s by the visionary craftsman George Nakashima, who believed the irregular edge of a slab was not a flaw to be corrected but a record of the tree's life to be honored. Here, that philosophy is on full display. The slab's natural boundary — raw, irregular, honest — floats inside its frame like a landscape painting, the swirling golden and amber grain at the center erupting into a dark, twisted knot that is the most dramatic feature on the piece. You will stare at it. Everyone will.
That frame is American Black Walnut — a deep chocolate ring that encircles the olive slab like a border around a map of somewhere ancient. The walnut is cool and composed where the olive is wild and warm. They are, in their contrasting characters, exactly right together. At the cardinal hours, Padauk hour markers — that blazing red-orange wood from West Africa — snap the composition into focus, three distinctly different continents of wood sharing a single, 12-inch face.
The hands are matte black. Slender. Getting out of the way. The wood has the floor.
- Face: Live-edge Olive Wood slab, natural edge preserved
- Frame/Ring: Solid American Black Walnut
- Hour markers: African Padauk inlay
- Hands: Matte black
- Diameter: 12 inches
- Movement: Precision quartz
- Finish: Natural Finish
- Handmade — each clock is one of a kind
Twenty million years in the making. Worth the wait.
