Nutty jewelry

In the village of Ivoryton, small images of elephants adorn shop signs. The library displays a pair of huge tusks, while businesses like the Tuskan Restaurant take a cue from history.

For almost 100 years, some 90 percent of all the ivory imported to the United States from Africa was shipped to factories in Ivoryton or nearby Deep River.

By 1850, a few small companies were using the elephant tusks to make combs, toiletries, billiard balls and sewing implements. The business grew into making piano keys, as told in the book "Around Essex: Elephants and River Gods," fueled by a national demand for a piano in every parlor during the Victorian period.

These days, plastic materials have replaced ivory in manufacturing many of those products, but consumer demand for ivory remains in some parts of the world. Although the international commercial ivory trade was banned in 1989, poaching continues to threaten the endangered animals.

Ivoryton resident Desiree Richardell could help change that.

Originally from Ecuador, Richardell is part of a family business that's marketing "vegetable ivory" as an alternative to the real thing.

Richardell makes jewelry from tagua, a palm tree that grows in the forests of South America. It's the only plant product that produces a material so white, durable and pure, she says.

The plant version, however, is lighter, harder and less porous than real ivory.

When Richardell's family came to the United States about 10 years ago, her aunt wanted to start a business that would also help their home country. She discovered the tagua nut.

During the first and second world war, tagua was used for buttons on U.S. army uniforms, making it a major industry in Colombia and Ecuador. It, too, fell out of use in lieu of plastic, but it's coming back into use for various crafts.

Richardell started out making jewelry for craft shows, but the 28-year-old mother recently
decided to give up her part-time job at a flower delivery company call center and is opening a store in Olde Mistick Village.

Her extended family, along with six other families, lives in the rainforest and collects the tagua seeds, which fall naturally so the harvest doesn't harm the trees. The seeds then have to dry in the sun for six to 10 months.

The nuts are sent to her aunt, whose husband is a woodcarver. He carves the plant into pieces, polishing some, dyeing some and leaving others in a natural form.

Richardell then turns the pieces into chunky bracelets, necklaces, earrings and rings, some wrapped in wire designs.

Some pieces, because they come from a plant, she even fries in oil, so the ivory color gets toasted to a light brown.

"We knew the sun makes it age so we just played around with it," Richardell said. "It smells like French fries."

Richardell said the families in Ecuador are paid a salary, rather than per pound, so they have a monthly income, which is important to her because the poverty rate in her home country is about 38 percent.

"I know I'm not changing the world, but this is something that can help," Richardell said.

Richardell says customers come to her with ivory pieces asking her to make pieces to match. She also works with calabash, a gourd, to make jewelry such as what one of her customers called "potato chip earrings," because they are thin, dried slices of the vegetable. Another bracelet is made with dried acai seeds and orange peels.

She will bring the elephant themes of Ivoryton to Mystic with her store, Vegetable Ivory, selling jewelry that she says is affordable, with a set of necklace and earrings costing around $25.

"It's jewelry with a little touch of organic," Richardell says.