Tree shaping

The Needle and Thread tree by Axel Erlandson

Tree shaping (also known by several alternative names) is a form of living sculpture wherein woody plants are cultivated and trained to grow into ornamental shapes or useful implements. Artists choose from among various compliant wood species and an evolving array of techniques and tools to shape living wood as it grows, perhaps bending, weaving, twisting, braiding, grafting, molding, or pruning to achieve an intended design.

The craft has been practiced for at least hundreds of years, as demonstrated by the living root bridges of India. Early ornamental tree shapers were John Krubsack, who made the first known "living chair" in 1914, and Axel Erlandson who opened a horticultural attraction called the Tree Circus in 1947. Contemporary tree shapers include Richard Reames who coined the term "arborsculpture", Dr. Christopher Cattle who uses the phrase "grown furniture", and Peter Cook and Becky Northey who use the term "pooktre".

History

The earliest known examples of tree shaping are the living root bridges of Cherrapunji and nearby Laitkynsew in the present-day Meghalaya state of northeast India. These bridges are made of living tree roots which are gradually trained to grow across a gap until they take root on the other side. There are specimens spanning over 100 feet and some may be over 500 years old. They are naturally self-renewing and self-strengthening as the component roots grow thicker.

In 1516 Jean Perréal painted an allegorical image of nature, "Dialogue between the Alchemist and Nature", in which a tree shaped as chair is used to symbolize a conduit between mankind and nature

Methods

Practitioners of tree shaping may employ a variety of horticultural, arboricultural, and artistic techniques to craft an intended design. Benches, chairs, and many other useful implements may be crafted from living, growing wood.

One technique involves bending young, small-caliper trees into a design shape. Trees thus shaped are then held in place for several years until the design is permanently cast. Each plant's growth rate determines the time necessary to overcome its resistance to the initial bending. The initial work of bending and securing in this way might be accomplished in an hour or perhaps in an afternoon. A related but distinct approach begins with much younger and more pliable seedlings or saplings, which are bent more gradually while the tree is growing to form the desired shape. Design and setup are fundamental to the success of such pieces. Both techniques employ approach grafting to purposefully direct and control the natural capacity of woody plant cambium to grow together, or pleach, on extended contact. Either may involve precise wounding of two or more sections of bark and then binding the wounded parts together securely while they grow together. As new layers of wood form at each point of contact, living wood swells the design and perpetuates the intended shapes. Supports may be employed as needed and removed once the design is self-supporting.

Another technique used is pruning to control and direct a plant's growth into a desired shape. Pruning above a leaf node can steer plant growth in the direction of the natural placement of that bud. A practice with results similar to pruning is to more or less slowly kill a branch by girdling it, whether by simply scoring a branch or by removing a narrow band of bark, thereby somewhat more controllably influencing the growth of the adjacent parent wood intended to remain in the finished design.

Aeroponic plant culture is yet another approach that may be employed, allowing roots to remain flexible enough to be shaped to form art or functional structures as they grow. According to US Patent No. 7,328,532, trees grown aeroponically stay "soft" and so can be subsequently shaped into a desired form. Living root bridges have exemplified this technique for several hundred years. New designs and techniques are reinventing the craft as eco-architecture, which may allow designers to grow and shape large structures such as homes.

Tree Species

In a given region, any disease and insect resistant tree species that grow well there might be good candidates for tree shaping. Each plant has its own quirks, but they can be understood with time and experience. Popular species for artists include:

Column-generating template families

The templates listed here are not interchangeable. For example, using {{col-float}} with {{col-end}} instead of {{col-float-end}} would leave a <div>...</div> open, potentially harming any subsequent formatting.

Column templates

Type	Family	Handles wiki table code?†	Responsive/ mobile suited	Start template	Column divider	End template
Float	"col-float"	Yes	Yes	{{col-float}}	{{col-float-break}}	{{col-float-end}}
	"columns-start"	Yes	Yes	{{columns-start}}	{{column}}	{{columns-end}}
Columns	"div col"	Yes	Yes	{{div col}}	–	{{div col end}}
	"columns-list"	No	Yes	{{columns-list}} (wraps div col)	–	–
Flexbox	"flex columns"	No	Yes	{{flex columns}}	–	–
Table	"col"	Yes	No	{{col-begin}}, {{col-begin-fixed}} or {{col-begin-small}}	{{col-break}} or {{col-2}} .. {{col-5}}	{{col-end}}

^† Can template handle the basic wiki markup {| | || |- |} used to create tables? If not, special templates that produce these elements (such as {{(!}}, {{!}}, {{!!}}, {{!-}}, {{!)}})—or HTML tags (<table>...</table>, <tr>...</tr>, etc.)—need to be used instead.

Tools

Pruning tools for cutting twigs and branches

Bonsai tools, which can also be used for Tree shaping

Various tools and materials may be used for creating, shaping, or even molding a project design, including boards, pipe, rope, wire, string, tape, existing furniture, etc. For example, a metal patio bench could be used as a design pattern. Shaping the design is accomplished with some of the same tools that gardeners, arborists, and horticulturists use, including hand pruners (secateurs) and pruning saws.

Shears and hedge trimmers are used less commonly, being better suited for topiary or hedge maintenance.

Styles

Each style may include abstract, symbolic, or functional designs and may be constructed with or without inclusions; materials such as glass, mirror, steel and stone. These may be incorporated either as structural or aesthetic elements. They are positioned in the project as it is cultured and, depending on the design, may either be removed when no longer needed for support or left in place to become fixed inclusions in the growing tissue. These are also known as "gluttonous trees".

Styles of tree shaping include:

• Architectural: planting and shaping trees into structures such as archways, rooms, houses, tunnels, and gazebos. Some designs use only woody plants to form the structures, others use both plants and inclusions to form them.
• Living Art: Plants are shaped with the intention that the design will continue to grow during the lifespan of the plants. When an arborsculpture is designed to stay alive, the piece is not finished until it dies.
• Intentional Harvest: Designs intended for harvest and drying which are finished growing when they have grown into the intended design. The grown wood composing the project piece(s) is cut, dried, and finished.

This mirror was shaped by Pooktre from the roots at planting (in 1997) and shaped as it grew. Harvested in 2004 and finished in 2005, it went to the World Expo 2005 in Aichi, Japan, at the Growing Village Pavilion.

Time Needed

The time needed to grow and construct a tree-shaping project varies according to size of targetted trees, growth rate of species used, design height, style, cultivation conditions and technique of shaping trees used.

• It is possible to perform initial bending and grafting on a project in an hour (e.g., Richard Reames' peace sign tree, pictured below), removing supports in as little as a year and following up with minimal pruning thereafter.
• It can take as little as one season of guiding the tree's growth to form the design, and then longer for the tree to thicken to the desired size. Larger designs like chairs and tree people may take 2 to 3 years to achieve the design then an additional 5 to 7 to get the desired size. All up approximately 8 to 10 years to grow a mature design, which can then remain growing or be harvested depending on the original intention. (e.g Pooktre garden chair below) Taller architectural projects (e.g., the archway by Axel Erlandson) may require 10 years or more to grow the trees enough to accomplish the grafting.

Tree shapers

John Krubsack

John Krubsack, 1919

John Krubsack planted 32 box elder (Acer negundo) seeds in 1903. He shaped and grafted the first known living chair. Dubbed The Chair that Lived, it is the only known tree shaping that John Krubsack did. He harvested and dried the chair 11 years after planting.

Axel Erlandson

The "Basket Tree" by Axel Erlandson

Axel Erlandson started shaping trees as a hobby on his farm in Hilmar, California, in 1925. In 1945, he opened a horticultural attraction called the Tree Circus in Scotts Valley, California. He shaped over 70 trees during his life. Erlandson's trees appeared in the column of "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" twelve times. Erlandson's Telephone Booth Tree is on permanent display at the Baltimore, Maryland, American Visionary Art Museum. Erlandson's Birch Loop tree is on permanent display at the Museum of Art History in Santa Cruz, California.

Dan Ladd

Dan Ladd started shaping trees in 1979. A current project incorporates eleven trees grafted next to each other to form a long hillside stair banister. He uses glass, metal and stone as inclusions for live wood to grow around and hold in place.

David Nash

David Nash first began work in the early 1970s on an "Ash Dome" tree sculpture. Nearly 30 years later, the work is now taking on the domed form that he had planned for and intended when he first began.

Christopher Cattle

A sycamore stool grown by Dr. Chris Cattle

Dr. Christopher Cattle started his first planting of furniture in 1996, having become inspired to do so in the late 1970s. Using various species of trees and wooden jigs to shape them, he has grown 15 three-legged stools to completion.

Cattle has multiple plantings in at least four different locations in England. He participates in woodland and craft shows in England, at the Big Tent at Falkland Palace in Scotland. He exhibited his stools at the 2005 World Expo in Nagoya, Japan.

His stated goal is to encourage as many people as possible to grow their own furniture. He refers to his shaped trees as "grown furniture" but also calls them "grownup furniture", as he sees it as a more environmentally mature alternative to traditional furniture.

Nirandr Boonnetr

In 1983, Nirandr Boonnetr began his first shaping project, a guava tree. Originally intended for his children to climb and play on, the piece evolved into a live tree chair. In fifteen years he created six pieces of "live art," including five chairs and a table. The Bangkok Post in 1996 referred to him as the "The father of Living Furniture." One of his chairs was exhibited in the Growing Village Pavilion at the 2005 World Expo in Achi, Japan.

Peter Cook and Becky Northey

Artist Peter Cook Chair grown by the Pooktre method

A tree person in 2009, planted by Pooktre in 1998

Artists Peter Cook and Becky Northey started tree-shaping in 1987 and claim to have created the first shaped trees grown like people. In 1996, after nine years of experimentation without being aware of any other tree shapers, they called their work Pooktre. Some examples of functional artwork created in the Pooktre style include a growing garden table, a harvested coffee table, hat stands, mirrors and a gemstone neck piece. Their methods involve gently guiding a tree's growth along predetermined design pathways over long time periods. The most common tree species they use is Prunus myrobalan. They shape trees that are harvested, dried, and finished for indoor art, as well as trees that are intended to continue growing.

Pooktre artists first gained widespread attention during the World Expo 2005 at the Growing Village Pavilion in Aichi, Japan, where they showed eight of their art pieces for six months, two of which were people trees. The artists were contacted by Ripley's Believe It or Not and they provided three photos, which Ripley Entertainment Inc later published in their yearly book series.

Richard Reames

An arborsculpture by Richard Reames entitled Peace in Cherry, depicting the CND logo

Richard Reames began his work with trees in 1992. He was inspired by the tree shaping of Axel Erlandson to begin his first experiments with shaping trees into chairs in the spring of 1993. In 1995, he wrote and published his first book, How to Grow a Chair: The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary, and in it he coined the word "Arborsculpture." The word has since been used in media around the world to refer to the techniques of various tree shapers, including Axel Erlandson.

Mr. Wu

Mr. Wu, who lives in China, has successfully grown a harvested chair. He has six more growing in his garden. He uses elm trees, which are pliant and do not break easily. He says that it takes him about five years to grow a tree chair.

Comparison with other methods

Tree shaping is related to other horticultural practices such as bonsai, espalier, pleaching and topiary, though a number of distinctions may be identified.

Bonsai

Bonsai is an art of growing trees in pots and containers using pruning techniques to keep the trees at a miniature size and copper wire to shape the tiny branches. Bonsai avoids woven branch patterns or branches bent to resemble identifiable shapes. A bonsai project is intended to appear as if a human had not shaped it, like a representation of a miniature tree, if one could be found in the wild. Shaping trees is almost the opposite concept, because the project shapes visually "announce" that a human has shaped them.

It is possible to make a miniature shaped tree in a bonsai pot and keep it reduced to miniature size, but if it were to resemble a pretzel, for example, that would not be the true nature of bonsai. It would just be a miniature shaped tree in a pot or container.

Espalier

Espalier is the horticultural technique of training trees through pruning and/or grafting to make formal two-dimensional, or single-plane, patterns with branches of trees or shrubs. Shaped-tree projects are not limited to a flat single plane, nor to a pattern. Either technique may use species of trees that produce fruit, but espalier-trained trees are not known to be shaped into benches, mirror frames, table pedestals or woven pillars.

Pleaching

Pleaching is more similar to shaped trees than topiary or espalier, but pleaching is limited to flat planes and hedges, and, therefore, it is not a three-dimensional tree shaping. If a person chose to weave and graft several trees into a flat hedge, that hedge would be one individual shaped-trees project.

Topiary

Topiary may include the manipulation of stems but is primarily the art and skill of producing shapes with leaves (foliage). By contrast, tree shaping is primarily the practice of manipulating stems and bonding trees together by grafting. Shaped trees may include some topiary effects, but topiary is not the primary feature and consideration of the practice as a whole.

Although it is possible to use grafting for topiary, its use is rare. Shaped trees include furniture and items that were constructed exclusively using plant growth and grafted plant tissue. These items can be severed from the roots or removed from the ground, no longer being living organisms, but topiary is virtually limited to live organisms (plants) with leaves.

Topiary almost always involves regular shearing and shaping of foliage, whereas shaped-tree projects can easily be formed without shearing.

Alternative names

Other names for tree shaping include:-

• arborsculpture

Richard Reames coined the word "arborsculpture" in his first book "How to Grow a Chair"

• biotechture
• botanical architecture

Planting of evergreens, to provide accommodation for outdoor theatrical entertainment.

Mark Primack gives lectures about Axel Erlandson's World Famous Tree Circus and visionary pioneer of "botanic architecture".

Marcel Kalberer's experiments with "botanical architecture"

Growing a cover of plants vertically up exterior walls of buildings.

• eco-architecture
• grownup furniture

Dr Chris Cattle calls his shaped trees "grownup furniture",

• living art
• tree trunk shaping
• tree trunk topiary

Christoph and Myriam de Cock are the owners of "tree trunk topiary". They run a nursery were they and their employees shape trees to sell.

• pooktre

Peter Cook and Becky Northey refer to their art work as "pooktre"

Among tree shapers, there is disagreement regarding which terms are generic and which are technique-specific, as well as which terms should be capitalized.

See also

• Fab Tree Hab
• Gilroy Gardens

External links

• World Tree shapers, history and links
• Designs and photos of Axel N Erlandson art
• History of the Tree Circus
• Extreme Nature Installations, Lectures, Art and Innovation
• Grownup Furniture
• Pooktre
• Plantware Technology and Art
• Arborsculpture: books, tools, installations, history and links