Fossil Record

Spalted hackberry end grain framed in purpleheart. The hackberry is doing the work — aggressive spalting lines trace through the pale wood like preserved organic matter in sedimentary rock, darker mineralized zones pooling where fungi concentrated during the drying process. The purpleheart frame is cut into cross-braces rather than a continuous border, so the hackberry reads as specimens set into a display case rather than decoration. What you are looking at is a record of what happened inside the log before it was a board.