Bird Stump Vase

A Bird stump is a variety of vase popular in 1920s England. It was generally made of porcelain in the shape of a tree stump, with a bird for decoration. Stumps of branches on the side of the tree formed the openings into which the stems of flowers might be inserted.

A bird stump plays a role as the MacGuffin in Connie Willis's 1997 time travel science fiction novel To Say Nothing of the Dog: How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last.

Famous quotes containing the words bird, stump and/or vase:

    Lord, I do fear
    Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;
    My soul is all but out of me,—let fall
    No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.
    Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

    The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,—these are the only traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the “South Sea”; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.
    Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)