Mushroom Urns

Foraging is often more about the slow looking than the actual searching. It is a practice of walking with eyes down, where much of the time is spent finding nothing, but for those who love it, the walking itself was the point. Below the forest floor, what appears to be a solitary mushroom is actually part of a vast, hidden network running between trees for years.

This collection is for the person who found purpose in that quiet movement through the woods. They were the ones who understood that the real life was happening just beneath the surface, and they held that knowledge close. Perhaps they were the grower, tending to life on logs and in the shed, or the teacher, taking children into the forest to show them what to pick up and what to leave alone.

Many foragers treat their favorite patches like fishermen treat theirs, keeping the location a secret and only passing it down to family at a certain time. There is also a storied visual culture among the bright, strange species found in the wild. For some, these colorful forms are a way to honor a personality that was just as vibrant.

If your loved one was someone who embraced the colorful and the unusual, they might have found a traditional urn too somber. They were likely the one who would not tell anyone where the good ground was, keeping their secret spots close to their heart. This collection honors that specific way of being, celebrating the person who found beauty in the strange and the bright.

The designs are engraved directly into the cast aluminum, featuring three distinct patterns: a nature mushroom, melting mushrooms, and mushrooms with hands. Each piece is finished in a range of colors through paint or a hand-applied enamel with silver bands. Every urn is built with a felt base and a threaded screw-top lid.

To ensure the collection can serve your family's needs, it is available in full-size, sharing, and keepsake sizes. You may choose to have a name and dates engraved into the metal in a two-tone style, making the engraving a permanent part of the piece. Whether you choose one piece or several, these urns are for those who still know where the good ground is.

The largest living thing ever found is a fungus. A single Armillaria ostoyae in the Malheur National Forest in the Strawberry Mountains of Oregon covers about 2,200 acres, three and a half square miles, and weighs something like 35,000 tons. It is thought to be around 8,000 years old.

Almost all of it is underground: filaments called rhizomorphs, shoestrings, running under bark and between trees to reach what it needs. The mushrooms only show in autumn, and they are the smallest part of it. For a family, the design on the urn is the ground the person knew, and what they showed the people who went out with them.

Source: Wikipedia, Armillaria ostoyae

If the person you remember was someone who found peace in a patient observation of the forest floor and possessed a truly colorful spirit, then these designs will read as theirs. A sibling or a friend might recognize that specific way of being in the lines of the mushrooms. Families often choose this collection because the autumn woods belonged to the person, and because someone in the family still knows where the mushrooms grow thickest.

When you look at these pieces, you will see the woods in autumn. The family will picture them there, walking through the leaves with a lowered gaze.

Our guide to selecting the right size urn