Guy Wolff Pottery

Handmade with respect and admiration for work from the hands of English, French, Tuscan and American potters of the 18th & 19th century, each piece of Guy Wolff Garden Pottery is hand thrown on a potters wheel by accomplished artisans.

Our pottery is fiished in two different manners: our unique Terra Cotta Moss finish is applied by hand before firing, and then fired to nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit for lasting durability. We also produce a line of garden pottery with rustic painted finishes.

The Royal Oak Foundation Collection

Guy Wolff was first inspired during his years as an apprentice potter by the historic gardens, great and small, throughout the United Kingdom, and the pots that fill them.

The entire line of horticultural pottery takes its form from the historical relationships between the botanists of England and America, the relationship between the two and the pottery they have used. Please join us as we celebrate this relationship by supporting the work of the Royal Oak Foundation here in the USA.

Working as Americans in alliance with the National Trust of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, their good work helps preserve places of natural beauty and historic importance, which were threatened by the rush of industrialization. With the sale of each pot we are all helping the gardens that have made our gardening aesthetic, our palette, so much larger.

The Peale Pot

In 1801, Charles Wilson Peale's younger son Rubens, came home from art school in London with a geranium for his father's new natural history museum. His brother, Rembrandt Peale, painted the now famous "Ruben Peale with Geranium."

It shows the beautiful flowerpot that is the inspiration for the Peale Pot. After the portrait was painted, the Peale family gave the geranium (one of the first to come to the America's) to then President Thomas Jefferson. It is believed that Jefferson later gave the pot and plant to his friend Margaret Bard Smith of Washington, D.C.

Clay Bell Jars

Here's your chance to be creative! These Bell Jars work for forcing, covering plants from the cold, or simply as beautiful lawn or garden ornamentation. We're amazed at how many uses people have found for them!

The Gertrude Jekyll Collection

Gertrude Jekyll, one of the most significant names in garden design today, was born in London in 1843. She perceived garden making as a fine art which required a wide range of horticultural skills to transform an artistic design into reality. By her death in 1932, she had produced 13 books, over a thousand published articles, and plans for some 250 gardens.

Guy Wolff: "For as many years as I have worked on making garden pots and been interested in the history of gardening, I have been a huge fan of Gertrude Jekyll's gardens. I have always wished to give her a pot. How does one give a pot to a person long departed, you might ask? You look to their work. Jekyll's gardens were famous for their informal formality, and she loved the Greek urn shape made at Comptons, south of London. I always thought she should have had a simpler pot, though still formal in nature.

Here, then, is a tall pot, starting with a formal colonnade foot and then springing a pure, but simple Greek curve, ending with an art deco scraffito banding at the neck near the top of the pot: Formal Informality. This is the pot I would have given to Gertrude Jekyll if I had ever had the pleasure of meeting her. I hope she would have liked it, and I dedicate it to her very large contribution to gardening as we know it today."

The Terra Cotta Moss Finish Scallop Jars

This finish is a unique mixture of white clay, red earth and minerals that combine to create a visual texture similar to antique garden pots from the 18th & 19th century.

The Terranova Pot

As a young man in 1974, Guy Wolff was invited to make the clay for a visiting Italian folk potter who was coming to teach traditional Italian pottery methods to the nuns of a local convent. He happily said yes, on the condition that he would get the chance to meet Emanuel Rondinoni and see his very strong Southern Italian tradition.

It was obvious to Guy at their first meeting that Rondinoni was one of the last folk potters of a very old tradition. Guy tells this story: "I was told by Signor Rondinoni that years before, his brother, Vincenzo, had come to an estate in Cornwall, Connecticut to make flowerpots for a large house there and to sell others to the garden market here in Connecticut and in New York City. The year was 1935. The result was a group of pots that, very clearly, were generations older in definition then their counterparts coming out of modern Italian pottery shops. A memory of something very good, almost lost, was planted like a seed here in Litchfield County. As the years have gone by I keep being asked by gardeners to recreate pots left to them by parents or found in local gardens that have Vincenzo Rondinoni's mark on them.

It is a very natural step to celebrate these two brothers and their work by giving the inspiration of their forms -- the Terranova and Siracusa pots -- to our potters in Honduras and Wisconsin. As potters we all learn from the work that has come before us. We started G.Wolff & Co. with the simplest of English work pots, moved on to more ornamental 18th-century English pieces and Historical pottery from the United States, and now we are pleased to begin the production of very early Italian "Country Pottery".

As always, my hope is to bring something of beauty and human dignity to our gardens. The story of the Rondinoni brothers and the memory of their work adds dimension to our lives as potters. They will not be forgotten. My warm thanks to them both for enriching my life."