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Oak & Sprout
| ˈtɪl·ɪ·ə |
n. — the lime, or linden. From the Latin.
Upon the hills of Phrygia I have seen two sacred trees, a lime-tree and an oak, so closely grown their branches interlace.
An oak and a lime, growing from one trunk. Oak & Sprout is the oak. Tilia is the lime — and it is how we look after the families who keep coming back to us.
The story, and what it has to do with you
The name
Ovid tells it in the eighth book of the Metamorphoses.
Somewhere in the hills of Phrygia there was a small thatched house, and in it an old couple who had been poor together for so long they had stopped minding. One evening two travellers came down the road. They had knocked at a thousand doors that day and every one had been shut to them. At the thousand-and-first, the latch lifted.
The old pair set out everything they had, which was almost nothing — olives, cheese, a cabbage, some bacon they had been keeping for a better day. Baucis wiped the table down with mint. Philemon went out to catch their one goose, and could not, and came back laughing.
Then they noticed the wine bowl filling itself.
The travellers were Jupiter and Mercury. They walked the old couple up the hillside, and when the two turned round the valley was under water, every shut door with it — and their own small house was standing above the flood with a golden roof, become a temple while they were still living in it.
The gods offered them a wish. They did not ask for the water back, or for gold. They asked to keep the temple, and to go in the same hour, so that neither would have to bury the other.
They kept it for years. And then, standing at the door one morning, each saw leaves coming out of the other, with just enough time left to say goodbye. Two trees from a single trunk — he an oak, she a lime. Ovid says they are standing there yet.
We make things meant to outlast the childhood they were bought for. The club is named for her tree, and for the rest of it: a door that opened, a table laid with everything there was, a bowl that kept filling, and a house that turned into something else while the people inside it went on living their lives.
The house
Three names, and they are the same house at three moments of the story. You move through them by coming back.
the door they opened
A thousand doors had been shut before theirs. Yours opens with your first parcel, and you are inside from then on.
the table they laid
They set out everything they had, which was almost nothing, and it was enough for two gods.
what the house became
They went up the hill poor and turned round to find the roof had gone to gold.
The currency
When their hour came, Philemon and Baucis put out leaves. It seemed the right word for what you gather here.
A leaf for every pound you spend, added the day your parcel sets off, so they turn up about when the toy does.
They keep as long as you do. Leaves are the sort of thing you forget you have and then come across later, like a note in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn since spring.
Your tier is counted on every leaf you have ever gathered, rather than the ones you happen to be holding. Spend as many as you like — the house stays yours.
Check and spend your leaves balance here →Whatever tier you are
The miracle Philemon and Baucis noticed first was not the temple. It was the wine bowl on their own table, filling itself back up.
Our guarantee runs for as long as the toy does, and it runs again the next time. If a piece goes under the sofa, or into the garden, or somewhere nobody can account for — tell us which one, and another is on its way to you.
That has always been true of everything we make. From in here, it is simply easier to see.
How the guarantee works →At Temple
Every December we make something that never reaches the website. Some years it is a book; some years a toy we drew up for the pleasure of drawing it up.
It is chosen here, wrapped here and sent to the families who have been coming back the longest — and by then we know who you are without having to look it up.
Coming in
You are in from your first order. There is no form to fill in and nothing to remember: your leaves start counting the moment a parcel sets off with your name on it.
Go and look at the toys →Twenty leaves is a pound off anything we make, and they can be spent from fifty leaves upward. Leaves are counted on what you actually pay, after any discount, and not on postage. If an order is refunded, its leaves go back with it. Leaves do not expire.
The plate is Tilia ulmifolia Scop., plate 15 of Hermann Adolph Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, Gera-Untermhaus, 1887, drawn by Walther Müller. Public domain.