3'7" x 5'9" Persian Qum Silk Rug | Green Tree of Life Prayer Design | 1980s Pure Silk Pile

This is a small piece that behaves like a painting. Woven in pure silk in the 1980s, it carries a prayer arch over a soft green field, with a flowering tree rising between two slender columns and birds, butterflies and hanging lamps set into the open ground. The silk takes light differently from every angle, so the field shifts from pale sea green to a deeper jade as you walk around it, which the photographs on this page show clearly. At 3'7" x 5'9" it sits in the 4x6 rug class, small enough to hang on a wall or lay in a study, bedroom or entry where it will be seen up close. Pile and ends are full and even, the fringe is original and intact, and the piece ships with our certificate of authenticity. If you want the background on this weaving city before you buy, read our complete guide to Persian Qum rugs.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classic prayer composition. A rust and brown arabesque spandrel spans the top of the field to form the mihrab arch, with a crowned cartouche at its apex and 4 hanging lamps suspended on fine black chains. Two fluted columns, each rising from an ivory footed vase and wrapped in a chevron stripe and trailing vine, frame the sides. Between them grows the tree of life: a single brown trunk supported by a woven trellis, branching into dense clusters of blossom drawn in ivory, cocoa, deep brown and pale green. Along the base sit palm fronds, a flowering shrub and low grasses, so the field reads as a real garden rather than a flat pattern. Birds face each other across the upper field, a butterfly hovers to one side, and the detail photographs show how tightly each feather, petal and lamp tassel is drawn. The main border runs on a near black ground with 8 petal rosettes alternating with ivory palmettes and curling leaves, fenced by narrow rosette and meander guard stripes.

A Sea Green Field Framed in Rust, Navy and Brown

Green is the rarest of the classic Persian field colors, and here it is the whole point of the rug. The ground is a soft celadon sea green that lightens toward mint where the silk catches the light and cools to a grey green in the shadow of the pile. Against it, the arch and spandrels are worked in warm rust and copper with chestnut brown outlines, and the tree is built from layered browns, tobacco, ivory and cream with small flecks of blush pink and pale blue green in the blossom. The columns and vases are drawn in ivory with brown shading, which keeps the sides of the field bright. The main border reverses everything: a deep navy black ground carries mushroom pink rosettes, olive leaf centers and cream palmettes, with a cinnamon brown guard band and tiny red, gold and ivory florets stitched through the minor stripes. The fringe is natural ivory. The overall effect is cool at the center and warm at the edges, which is why this rug reads as calm rather than busy despite the amount of drawing in it.

Qum: Persia's Silk Weaving City

Qum is a relative newcomer among Persian weaving centers, with commercial production starting in the 1930s, and it built its reputation on one thing: refinement. The workshops there use only the finest silk, and the rivalry between them pushed knot counts and drawing standards to a level that older cities took centuries to reach. Silk holds a finer knot than wool, so a Qum weaver can render a bird's eye, a lamp tassel or a single blossom stem in a way that is simply not available at village scale, and the reverse of this piece shows that density with a crisp, legible drawing on the back. A prayer rug of this size is a workshop showpiece rather than a floor commodity, which is why so many of them survive in the condition this one is in. If you are comparing weaves and want to understand what separates one silk piece from another, our guide to Persian silk rugs walks through fineness, sheen and how to test them.