You won’t find nat­u­ral­ist David Freda con­tem­plat­ing the ways and means of wildlife with just a mag­ni­fy­ing glass or tweez­ers in his hand. It’s more like inspi­ra­tion finds him rather than the other way around. He spends most of his time pur­su­ing one of his many out­door pas­sions: bird watch­ing, taxi­dermy, fal­conry, scuba div­ing, moun­tain bik­ing or rock climb­ing. He is also quite happy to turn that rock over to see what is going on under­neath because he says with unre­served zeal, “You find all kinds of crazy stuff in there.” He has a remark­able, if uncom­mon, regard for nature’s obdu­rate and often unflat­ter­ing pos­tures. Yet it is there amidst the soil and its inhab­i­tants where Freda will dis­cover his muse. When he does return home, his inspi­ra­tion accom­pa­nies him and guides him through the jour­ney of recre­at­ing nature in jew­eled form. Work­ing orig­i­nally in sil­ver, Freda met with lit­tle oppo­si­tion when he applied enamel to the arma­ture. Fir­ing after fir­ing, each painstak­ing layer repro­duced as planned. When he finally cast his pieces in gold, well, that was another mat­ter alto­gether. No one told him that gold was a proud metal that wouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily per­mit another player to upstage it.

Enam­el­ing on gold is an art form only for those who have supreme patience, yet Freda is a man who under­stands that inti­macy with nature can­not be hur­ried; time creeps along at a pace set by snails, hatch­ing bird eggs, or orchids bloom­ing over the course of days and weeks. After months of exper­i­men­ta­tion and fail­ure, Freda finally dis­cov­ered the way to mold and fire his blooms so that they do not merely evoke the essence of their nat­ural coun­ter­parts, they imper­son­ate them with an exac­ti­tude that sur­prises orchid spe­cial­ists. Such a mon­u­men­tal achieve­ment has not gone unno­ticed in the world of jew­elry and gems. Freda’s sec­ond col­lec­tion was snapped up by Tiffany & Com­pany within the last few months. Orchid jew­els of these dimen­sions and qual­ity have not been seen in more than one hun­dred years when Pauld­ing Farn­ham cre­ated glo­ri­ously beau­ti­ful flower-form brooches and cor­sage dec­o­ra­tions for the Paris Expo­si­tion of 1889.

In par­tic­u­lar, the two dozen enam­eled orchid brooches designed for this event received the high­est praise, “twenty-four species of orchids, which are so faith­fully repro­duced that one would almost doubt that they are enamel, so well do they sim­u­late the real flow­ers.” Orchids were a sym­bol of wealth and sta­tus dur­ing the last quar­ter of the nine­teenth cen­tury, and orchid fever was at its height when Tiffany & Co. dis­played its exam­ples at the Paris Expo­si­tion. Con­se­quently, col­lec­tors of real orchids, such as the financier Jay Gould, began to col­lect Farnham’s jew­eled ones for per­sonal enjoy­ment. By 1900 Tiffany had expanded its stock to include 15 more vari­eties.