Tree fortifications Julius Caesar describes in his
De Bello Gallico that the
Nervii planted and bent trees into wall-like hedges. Similar practices have been used throughout Europe until the 18th century, often as a comparatively cheap method to delineate regional borders with large-scale border fortifications. The resulting fortifications that developed around the original bent trees, usually left alone for centuries, could range up to 100 m in thickness. A similar example from Asia was the
Willow Palisade that derived its name from the willows with
wickered branches that made up part of the barrier.
War-Khasi people The ancient
War-Khasi people of India worked with the aerial roots of native
banyan fig trees, adapting them to create footbridges over watercourses. Modern people of the Cherrapunjee region carry on this traditional building craft. Roots selected for bridge spans are supported and guided in darkness as they are being formed, by threading long, thin, supple banyan roots through tubes made from hollowed-out trunks of woody grasses. Preferred species for the tubes are either
bamboo or
areca palm, or 'kwai' in
Khasi, which they cultivate for
areca nuts. The Khasi incorporate aerial roots from overhanging trees to form support spans and safety handrails. Some bridges can carry fifty or more people at once. At least one example, over the Umshiang stream, is a double-decker bridge. They can take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional and are expected to last up to 600 years.
John Krubsack John Krubsack was an American banker and farmer from
Embarrass, Wisconsin. He shaped and grafted the first known grown chair, The idea first came to him to grow his own chair during a weekend wood-hunting excursion with his son. He started
box elder seeds in 1903, selecting and planting either 28 of the saplings in a carefully designed pattern in the spring of 1907. 24 trees from his original garden have survived transplanting to their permanent home at
Gilroy Gardens in
Gilroy, California. His
Telephone Booth Tree is on permanent display at the
American Visionary Art Museum in
Baltimore, Maryland and his
Birch Loop tree is on permanent display at the
Museum of Art and History in
Santa Cruz, California. Both of these are preserved dead specimens.
Arthur Wiechula Arthur Wiechula was a German
landscape engineer who lived from 1868 to 1941. In 1926, he published
Wachsende Häuser aus lebenden Bäumen entstehend (Developing Houses from Living Trees) in German. In it, he gave detailed illustrated descriptions of houses grown from trees and described simple building techniques involving guided grafting together of live branches; including a system of v-shaped lateral cuts used to bend and curve individual trunks and branches in the direction of a design, with reaction wood soon closing the wounds to hold the curves. He proposed growing wood so that it constituted walls during growth, thereby enabling the use of young wood for building. Ladd calls human-initiated inosculation 'pleaching' and calls his own work 'tree sculpture'. A current project at the
DeCordova and Dana Museum and Sculpture Park in
Lincoln, Massachusetts incorporates eleven
American Liberty Elm trees grafted next to each other to form a long hillside stair banister. Another of his installations,
Three Arches, consists of three pairs of 14-foot
sycamore trees, which he
grafted into arches to frame different city views, at
Frank Curto Park in
Pittsburgh.
Nirandr Boonnetr Nirandr Boonnetr is a Thai furniture designer and crafter. He became inspired as a child, both by a photograph of some unusually twisted
coconut palms in southern
Thailand and by a living fallen tree he noticed, which had grown new branches along its trunk, forming a kind of canopied bridge. He began his first piece, a guava chair, . Shortly thereafter, he presented a chair as a gift to her Royal Highness,
Princess Sirindhorn. Nirandr Boonnetr has written a detailed, step-by-step booklet of instructions hoping his hobby of living furniture will spread to other countries. They were the featured artists at the Growing Village pavilion showing 8 pieces of grown art at the
World's Expo 2005 in
Nagakute,
Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Their methods involve guiding the tree's growth along predetermined wire design pathways over a period of time. He was inspired by the works of Axel Erlandson, and began sculpting trees in 1991 or 1992. He began his first experimental grown chairs He started his first planting of furniture in 1996. in response to questions from students asking how to build furniture using less energy. he has grown 15 three-legged stools to completion. He hopes to inspire others to grow their own furniture, and "grown furniture", calling them "the result of mature thinking." He enjoys some worldwide fame. He has patented his technique of growing wooden chairs and as of 2005, had designed, grown, and harvested one chair, in 2004. He had six more growing in his garden. which he says are pliant and do not break easily. by training trees in his chair orchard located at Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, England. Munro co-founded
Full Grown in 2005. == Related practices ==