When Tarun Adlakha displays a dendritic agate, with its finely detailed markings that look like trees and leaves, most clients think it was painted by an artist. “They don’t believe me when I tell them that these are paintings by God, made by nature,” said Mr. Adlakha, a gem specialist in New Delhi who, in jewelry circles, is considered the world’s foremost dealer in dendritic agate.
The painterly designs in the stones are inclusions, called dendrites, the iron or manganese mineral deposits from water that permeated the stone as it was formed over hundreds of years.
“People fall in love with the magic of the stones, and no two stones are alike,” said Judy Geib, a jeweler in New York City who has featured them in her designs for 25 years.
She is among several designers who are showcasing the stone’s distinctive beauty in new jewelry pieces this season. “I call them a humble extravagance,” Ms. Geib said. “They don’t shout like big emeralds, but people are still drawn to them, they are fascinated by them and curious.” Her designs, from $2,000 to $6,000, set brownish and milky-white dendritic agate in gold settings with colorful gemstone accents.
From Ancient Times
Agate is a mined microcrystalline form of quartz and, like jasper, part of the chalcedony mineral class. The gemstone comes in a wide range of colors and patterns, but dendritic agate is among a subset of agates with inclusions that resemble naturalistic images. Landscape agate, for example, features what looks like blurry painterly images of trees, mountains and forests. And moss agate, which gets its greenish tint from traces of the mineral hornblende, resembles lush forests. (Mr. Adlakha noted that less than 1 percent of all agates display exceptional, clear images.)
The stone first was used in ornamental pieces by the ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations and has continued to appear in jewelry and home décor items over the centuries.
While dendritic agate has never gained widespread popularity, it was often seen in jewelry designs from the Georgian and Victorian eras. And Peter Carl Fabergé, the late 19th-century jeweler to the Russian imperial court who was known for combining creative materials in his jewelry and objects, used moss agate and dendritic agate in his designs.
Today, one of the world’s sources for top-quality dendritic agate is a 15.4-square-mile area in Madhya Pradesh in central India, a region where Mr. Adlakha grew up. He said the stones were also found in parts of the United States, Kazakhstan and Madagascar, but “nothing comes remotely close to the quality of the Indian deposit.”
For more than 400 years the Indian stones have been cut with a bow, slicing one layer at a time to reveal the dendritic patterns — a method that, Mr. Adlakha said, often takes days to cut a single stone. More efficient cutting techniques, using modern machinery, have come to the region, which has created a larger supply of stones. Still, it is a tedious process and requires skilled lapidarists to preserve the dendrite.
Over the past 30 years, Mr. Adlakha has amassed more than 400,000 agates. He still owns many, but also sells them through his company, Indus Valley Commerce, to brands and designers around the world.
Nature’s Art
Dendritic, landscape and moss agates are still unknown to many outside the gem world, but today more designers are using them to express a sense of individuality and highlight the natural world. Ms. Geib prefers to showcase the stone’s patterns in minimalist settings, while Cartier’s most recent high jewelry collection, Nature Sauvage, featured a reddish landscape agate as the backdrop of a large jeweled panther brooch.
Eugenie Niarchos, the creative director of Venyx in London, has been drawn to landscape and dendritic agate since she first saw them in 2016 at Mr. Adlakha’s booth at the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show. The following year, she featured agates with painterly landscapes in shades of gray and brown with gold moons and stars and surrounded by diamonds or a rainbow of gems.
This fall, her Venyx Noir collection for men and women went in a different direction. It featured graphic black and white dendritic agate framed in black enamel and diamonds, starting at $4,500. The collection was designed, she said, for her friends in London who wear all black.
“I looked for unisex stones with branches and abstract motifs, like ink blobs,” Ms. Niarchos said. “These are unique pieces of nature, which is why they are special gifts.”
As there is such a wide range of agate colors and patterns, Ms. Geib said that finding stones that suited her aesthetic wasn’t easy. She meets with Mr. Adlakha twice a year, when he visits New York, and she examines thousands of his dendritic agates. She favors gems that appear to have brownish ferns and landscapes, and some with reddish hues.
Elevating Design
Daria de Koning, a jeweler in Santa Fe, N.M., spent three years collecting dendritic and landscape agate and jasper for the 90-piece Landscape collection she unveiled last year ($2,500 to $30,000).
“A lot of my designs are focused on using underappreciated or unknown gemstones and elevating them,” Ms. de Koning said. “The stones in this collection are mind blowing.” She paired the stones with other gems to bring out their natural hues, such as earrings of moss agate combined with Mexican jelly opals and green tourmaline in an 18-karat gold setting.
Even seasoned jewelers are mesmerized by the stone. “Nature has always produced the greatest works of art,” said Dana McCrane, a founder of the Dana Kellin jewelry company in Los Angeles. “And the irony is that through these seemingly mundane processes, like water and minerals seeping through cracks in rocks, it created a world within a world.”
She leaves the stones to speak for themselves and wraps them in simple gold earrings and pendants, from $750 to $3,000.
Mr. Adlakha said agate was a stone that delivered what many people want. “We want to connect with the natural world, and this stone is a reminder of nature,” he said. “Emeralds and diamonds can be cut and faceted to anyone’s specifications, and you can’t tell the difference from one to the next.
“But every dendritic or landscape agate is unique and can’t be reproduced,” he added. “That’s what makes these truly desirable. You won’t find another.”
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