With the advent of inorganic dyes the demand for spalted wood declined and the laborious practice of sourcing it largely fell out of favor. Though it would pop up now and again throughout history, particularly in Regency-era England in the form of Tunbridge ware — souvenir boxes with wooden inlay from the spa town of Tunbridge Wells in Kent — its heyday was past. One of those preindustrial alchemies like cochineal, a female scale insect from the New World that was at one time a valuable source of carmine — the color in the walls and doors of Van Gogh’s famous bedroom at Arles — now largely banished to the cabinet of curiosities. Though it seems like the mystery has evaporated and little is left to the imagination, it nevertheless strains credulity to seriously consider that the eyes of the parakeet which stare back at us from the walls of a Renaissance man cave may be the result — the wake — of a hungry fungus.