If you ever thought that wooden furniture was simply made from the already dead planks of wood, then you haven’t conversed with a tree shaper!
Through an incredible amount of ingenuity, trees are shaped as they grow to create chairs, tables, bed-ends, candelabras, hat stands and even mirrors. Through carefully aiding the tree to grow around a “jig”, the tree follows a pre-determinded design pathway where it twists and distorts over several years to become any shape the grower decides.
Growing furniture can take up to ten years of work though careful training and grafting, allowing nature to take its own slow course until the self-generating tree is sturdy. The result is something truly unique and biodegradable.
Christopher Cattle of Grown Furniture who creates simple stools through this gradual craft acknowledges that, “Growing furniture isn’t going to save the planet, but it can show that it’s possible to create genuinely useful things without adding to the pollution that industry inevitably seems to produce. Grown stools will never look machine made, but they can be finished with varying degrees of rusticity.” Cattle has travelled widely throughout Europe providing unique sculptures and offering training.
Tree shaping is different from most forms of tree sculpting that we know today such as topiary or bonsai, but it has been around for centuries. British settlers created rustic bush furniture in Australia, while rugged chairs were made in Scotland which, due to its many rungs, doubled up as a drying rail. There was also a known craftsman from Ireland who made farm implements and tools that he required from hedges.
A miniature painted in the 16th Century is the first record of the craft’s existence, and the 18th Century scientist, philosopher and spiritual explorer, Emanuel Swedenborg wrote about living tree temples as part of his controversial writings. In 1903, Wisconsin-born John Krubsack received much attention for his experiment of growing the first known chair from seed. He notoriously declared, “Dammit, one of these days I am going to grow a piece of furniture that will be beer and stronger than any human hands can build.” After eleven years, the result was an epic, intricate gothic style piece of furniture.
More recently, Peter (Pook) Cook of Pooktre Tree Shapers and who grew up on a pineapple plantation in Queensland asked himself the rather quirky question as to whether he could grow his own chair too after an inspirational visit to his favourite place where three large fig trees nestled under the cliff face in 1987. Joining Becky Northley, the pair have slowly created their own tree sculpture garden in their homeland of Australia, mainly using willow or wild plum (prunus myrobalan) and have recently begun trailing black cherry (prunus serotina).
Richard Reames of Arbor Smith mentions on his website: “The common assumption is that these things take a long time and a lot of patience, the truth is time is an illusion and the sooner one starts the sooner one will have a substantially large tree. Do children grow up fast? How fast has the last ten years of your life gone by? You see it is all relative isn’t it?”
All current day tree shapers can offer assistance with designing and planting your own furniture, or accept commissioned pieces where they will transplant the living work once it has come to the end of its slow harvest.
For further inspiration check out Treenovation and the book, Arborsculpture – Solutions for a Small Planet, available from Amazon.com.
Images courtesy of Richard Reames
