There he crouches, the frog, looking up at us friendly—as if he were still about to leap, away from the garden and into his next forest adventure. His entire posture is remarkably lifelike and true to nature. We source this clay-molded animal from Portugal. It is still handmade there and is part of a long tradition of decorative everyday ceramic objects. In the garden, our tree frog likes to hide among the foliage of your perennials and shrubs; on the balcony, it sits just as decoratively between planters and pots.

Portuguese ceramics are widely known; their distinctive quality stems from the interplay of traditional craftsmanship and artistic design. An outstanding example of this creative approach to traditional craftsmanship is the Bordallo Pinheiro ceramics factory, founded in 1884 in Caldas da Rainha, north of Lisbon. Its founder, Raphael Bordallo Pinheiro, was not only an expert in ceramics but had also made a name for himself as a caricaturist and artist. Raphael’s creative signature still shapes Bordallo Pinheiro’s ceramics; the designers the company collaborates with today also incorporate his imaginative style into their work. Every single piece produced by Bordallo Pinheiro is carefully handcrafted, with the artisans being as skilled in traditional techniques as they are in contemporary forms of modeling, painting, and ornamentation.