A milestone worth celebrating
9th Anniversary Gifts
Willow and pottery are the traditional ninth anniversary gifts, with leather as a modern alternative.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of nine years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Willow, Pottery and Lapis: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
A willow basket, already packed
Hallmark’s idea, and a good one: fill a willow picnic basket with their favourite things and take it to the park for lunch. The basket will come out every summer after.
Weave something together
Book a beginners’ basket-weaving workshop for two and bring home whatever you make, however lopsided. Put the results somewhere you’ll both see them every day.
Willow pattern from the op shop
Go hunting for blue and white willow pattern at op shops, markets and antique fairs. Build a mismatched set together, one plate or platter at a time, and bring it out whenever friends come for dinner.
A terracotta pot with something growing in it
Terracotta is the 9th anniversary colour as well as a kind of pottery, so a big terracotta pot covers both. Plant it with something long-lived, like a lemon, a bay tree or the herbs you actually cook with.
Leather with their initials
Leather is the modern ninth anniversary gift. Have a wallet, keyring or weekend bag monogrammed with their initials, and choose one that will look better in ten years than it does today.
Lapis lazuli, deep blue with flecks of gold
Lapis lazuli is the 9th anniversary stone. GIA says the most prized is an intense, even, slightly violet blue with little or no pyrite, the gold-coloured flecks, though plenty of people love the flecks. Cufflinks, a pendant or a bead bracelet all suit it.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate nine years together
A genuine rose preserved and finished in 24 karat gold over 60 steps and many months, then polished by hand. Each rose retains its individual shape and character, so no two are exactly alike—a lasting reminder of your first nine years together.
- Includes a certificate of authenticity
- Presented in a luxurious display case, inside a gloss white gift box bearing our debossed gold leaf logo
- A timeless symbol of love, preserved to keep forever
- Rose approximately 29 cm long; display case 34 cm long
What the 9th means
Why willow and pottery
for nine years?
Willow and pottery are the traditional gifts for a ninth wedding anniversary. Both are humble, hard-working materials made to be used every day, which is a fair description of a marriage at nine years.
Why willow and pottery
Woven together, made to be used
A willow basket is only as strong as its weave. No single stem would carry much on its own, but woven together they’ll take a week’s shopping, year after year, and bend a little without giving way.
Pottery is the everyday kind of beautiful: the mug each of you reaches for first, the chipped bowl nobody will let you throw out. Nine years in, a marriage is full of things like that, ordinary and well used and not to be replaced.
Where it began
A love story on a dinner plate
The best-known meeting of willow and pottery is the blue and white willow pattern. It was created in England in the late 1700s to look Chinese, and printed onto plates from engraved transfers, which made a detailed design cheap enough for ordinary kitchens.
To help sell it, a story was invented to go with the picture. A mandarin’s daughter falls for her father’s clerk, the lovers escape over the bridge to an island, and when they’re finally caught, the gods turn them into the two doves flying at the top of the plate.
Around the world
Faience, wickerwork and clay
In Germany the ninth goes by more names than almost any other year: the ceramic, faience, porcelain, glass and crystal weddings, the water wedding and, more puzzlingly, the ox wedding. France calls it the noces de faïence, the faience wedding.
Dutch lists give earthenware, iron or wickerwork, the closest match to willow. Japan has the pottery wedding, and Spanish lists give clay.
9th anniversary symbols
Willow, lapis lazuli and poppies
Willow, pottery and leather
Emily Post and Hallmark give willow or pottery, Debrett’s British list gives both, and Britain’s Pears Cyclopaedia once listed copper instead. Leather is the modern alternative.
Lapis lazuli
People have prized lapis for more than 6,500 years, and GIA says its mines in Badakshan, Afghanistan, are the world’s oldest known commercial gem sources. Ground into ultramarine, it was the most expensive paint pigment of the Renaissance, and Vermeer used it in Girl with a Pearl Earring.
Poppy
Poppies come in almost every warm colour. For an anniversary, choose Iceland poppies in yellow, orange, salmon or pink: they’re among the best poppies for cutting and last several days in a vase.
Celebrating the 9th
Make a little time for the two of you
Book a long lunch at a winery, take the walk you took the day you got engaged, or switch off the TV and ask each other the questions you asked on your first date. Nine years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
If you like a theme, slow-cook dinner in a clay pot or tagine, serve it on your best pottery, and light the table with terracotta-coloured candles.
Whatever you plan, finish with a few written lines. Nine years of small kindnesses deserve to be put on the record at least once.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 9th means to others
Letters that capture nine years
Nine years in, you’ve got a system for most things, from who drives home after a party to which side of the bed is whose. A letter is a chance to step outside the system and say what you actually think of each other. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about the ninth year.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Matt,
I looked it up, and the ninth anniversary is pottery. I immediately thought of the mug you made at that work team-building day, the one shaped like a boot that leaks from the heel. You still use it every morning. I’ve stopped asking why.
It’s the same with everything, really. You keep things going long after anyone else would give up: the old ute, my grandmother’s clock, the sourdough starter, and me in the week before a deadline.
Nine years ago I married someone patient. I had no idea how often I’d need it.
Happy anniversary. There’s a new mug on the bench for you. It doesn’t leak, but you’re allowed to keep the boot.
All my love,
Claire
Dear Anh,
Nine years ago we married in your parents’ backyard in Cabramatta, under a marquee that blew halfway into the neighbour’s pool during the speeches. You laughed so hard you had to sit down. That’s when I knew we’d be fine.
This year has been a long one: your dad’s move into care, my new job, the kids’ swimming lessons at six in the morning. You carried more of it than I did, and you never once kept score.
I’ve booked us a night away with no alarms, and your sister has the kids. She says it’s her anniversary present too.
Thank you for nine years. I’d stand under that marquee again any day.
Love,
Tom
Dear Bec,
Let’s get this out of the way: last year I forgot. You found out when your mum rang to say happy anniversary and I said ‘To who?’
So this year it’s been in the calendar since February, on my phone, on the fridge and on a sticky note in my wallet. The kids have been briefed. Even the dog knows.
Nine years with you is the best thing I’ve done, and I’d like the record to show I remembered to say so on the right day.
Happy anniversary. Dinner’s booked, the babysitter’s confirmed, and I’ve already paid, so there’s no backing out.
Yours, reliably from now on,
Nick
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the nine-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Just after their ninth wedding anniversary in September 2023, George and Amal Clooney were asked about anniversary gifts at the Albie Awards in New York. George said he’d stuck to tradition: pottery for the ninth, so he gave her a pot. Amal admitted it ‘wasn’t an exciting one’, and joked that they’d have to wait about sixteen more years for a better traditional gift.
A short post from a local museum on the New South Wales South Coast, built around a large willow pattern meat platter in its collection. It explains how the design was printed onto pottery from transfers, why older pieces and factory seconds sometimes show a slipped or creased pattern, and retells the legend of the lovers who became doves. (The legend has a violent ending.)
In May 1935 Mr and Mrs W. R. Dalton marked nine years of marriage with a small party at their home in Mildura, with balloons and flowers in the lounge and breakfast room. The guests sang together and danced to the wireless, and two friends played extra tunes on the mouth organ. Their bridesmaid came from Jerilderie and their best man from Euston to be there, and the night ended with toasts and supper.
9th anniversary FAQ
