Pierced Butterfly Orchid Pot with Attached Saucer, Oxblood Red Flambé Glaze over Stoneware, c. 1980–2010

The Piece

A flared cylindrical pot in deep oxblood red, pierced through the walls with butterflies and four-petal blossoms and sitting on a saucer built as part of the same body. The profile is soft and slightly irregular — the rim undulates in a gentle quatrefoil rather than running true, and the walls swell where they were pressed — so the whole thing reads as made rather than manufactured.

The cutouts are the design. Each butterfly is fully articulated, two wings and a body, cut clean through the wall while the clay was leather-hard, and the blossoms between them open into four rounded petals. Where the tool went through, the glaze has pulled back and pooled dark along every cut edge, so each opening is drawn in near-black against the red. Light passing through turns them into silhouettes.

The glaze itself does the heavy lifting: a saturated raspberry red that breaks to smoky grey-violet at the rim, the ridges, and the foot, where it ran thin over the raised clay. It is the behavior of a flambé-type copper glaze — unpredictable in the kiln, different on every piece. The interior is glazed the same deep red, the saucer is pierced at its base for drainage, and the underside is left as raw clay.

History & Provenance

Pierced pots like this belong to the orchid-growing tradition. Orchids are epiphytes — in the wild their roots cling to tree bark in open air rather than sitting in soil — so the pots made for them are cut open at the sides to let air reach the roots and let water pass straight through. Growers in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia have made them for centuries, and the form spread worldwide with the orchid trade. The attached saucer is the practical half of the design: it catches what runs out without needing a separate dish that never quite matches.

The decoration follows the same logic as the function. Butterflies and blossoms are among the oldest auspicious motifs in Chinese decorative art — butterflies for joy and long life, flowers for the seasons — and cutting them through the wall turns ventilation holes into ornament. The copper-red glaze belongs to that world too, descending from the flambé and oxblood glazes the imperial kilns spent centuries perfecting. This example is unmarked, which is normal for garden and horticultural ware, and the felt pads on the base were added by a previous owner to protect a table.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Two jobs, and it is good at both. Plant an orchid, a small fern, or a trailing pothos in it and the cutouts do exactly what they were designed to do, while the attached saucer means you can set it on wood without a coaster. Or drop a pillar candle or a battery light inside and the butterflies throw across the wall — on a mantel, a bathroom shelf, a porch table on a summer evening, it becomes a lantern.

The color is the reason to own it either way. That raspberry red is deep enough to carry a shelf on its own and works hard against green foliage, dark wood, brass, and warm white walls. A note on care: this is glazed stoneware and it can live outdoors in mild weather, but bring it in before a freeze — water sitting in the drainage holes will expand and crack the body. Hand wash with warm water and a soft brush to reach into the cutouts, and if you plant directly in it, use a coarse orchid bark rather than potting soil, which will wash out through the openings.