This is an absolutely gorgeous pair of petrified wood bookends crafted from gem grade fossil wood. The beautiful stone you see now was transformed in a miraculous process from what was once a giant sequoia tree! This log was dug recently in Central Oregon near the town of Ashwood. It’s some of the highest quality, hardest petrified wood you’ll find anywhere. This set is one of our smaller sized, and still very dramatic pairs and it shows a ton of great wood grain. The wood structure is so finely preserved in this amazing stone fossil that some parts of it were actually chatoyant! The lighter color zone at the top is the slighty less silicified rind of the log while the more golden region in the lower half is very highly agatized and the wood grain makes the stone slightly chatoyant! The trunk of this tree was about 5 feet in diameter, so the several dozen growth rings you see clearly in the mirror polished faces of these stone bookends are just a small fraction of the life span of this massive tree! This wood is not only beautifully colored and finely preserved, it’s incredibly well agatized and took a magnificent polish. It’s the quality of our finishes on world class specimens like this one that sets Sticks in Stones Lapidary apart from the rest! This is a really beautiful specimen of the petrified wood found near Ashwood, Oregon. The ranch this massive tree was excavated on is private and does not normally allow any sort of rockhounding, but a single massive log was dug recently and produced a nice selection of blocky specimen grade pieces in the process. In this case we found a large enough piece to cut perfect “book matched” mirror image bookends, with absolutely gorgeous gem quality agate in many colors preserving this ancient fossil in exceptional detail. The exterior rind is rough and natural as it came from the ground, but the mirror polished face reveals countless growth rings and structure from an ancient sequoia giant! You can still see the wood grain in perfect detail. It looks just like a piece of firewood today would look. The inside however is a richly colored array of gem quality agate that preserved the wood grain beautifully in every detail! The growth rings in this attractive fossil specimen are very well defined and flow artfully. These are particularly fine in this piece indicating that it was a very slow growing tree, as you’d expect for it’s size. It’s really a lovely specimen! We select only the showiest pieces of petrified wood and other gemstones to cut into bookends. These pieces are carefully cut in our shop so that you end up with a perfectly matched pair, one agate piece is the mirror image of the other. Of course, there are plenty of differences in the two halves, but the photo should let you appreciate how well we do this. The bookends sit perfectly upright and are completely square to one another. They are felted on both the sides and bottom to protect the books and the shelf. We make sure they are 100% functional on top of being beautiful! Of course, these agates proudly show the perfect polish that the Sticks-in-Stones rockshop has dedicated itself to. The finish looks poured on – but there’s nothing there except rock!! This is the only set of bookends we have cut from this location so don’t miss this fabulous natural treasure! Each half measures about 5 3/4″ tall & 4 1/2″ wide at the widest spot on the polished face. They’re cut about 1 3/4 thick. Weight for this set is about 6.32 lbs. Which makes these bookends suitable for medium sized books like novels and paperbacks. What better way to accentuate a bookshelf or your mantle than with this unbelievable natural work of art!