We craft slow, considered tools for botanists and field photographers. Our first kit ships from a small workshop in Asheville in early spring.
Tetra Bloom designs and assembles small batches of botanical field kits in a renovated millhouse outside Asheville. Each kit is hand-finished, signed and numbered, with a guarantee of repair for life. We make no more than four hundred kits each year.
We made the prototype of this kit one winter for my sister, a botanist working on the eastern hellbender. She asked for something simple: a small box to keep notes dry, a loupe that did not slip from cold fingers, a press that would not crush spring trillium. We made it out of what the shop had, and she gave it back at the end of the season — improved, dented, signed.
The kit we are shipping in March is the eighth revision of that gift, much the same in spirit. The loupe is still brass and still 10×. The press has gained a third board. The journal is now bound by Loren at the Hatchery in Knoxville. The notebook paper has been changed twice and has now changed back. Almost nothing else differs.