Tree shaping

The Chair that Lived by John Krubsack

File:Arborsculpture.jpg

The Four Ring Tree by Axel Erlandson

Tree shaping, commonly called arborsculpture, pleaching or tree training and several other names, is the art of training living trees, plants and their roots into ornamental shapes and structures. It is a form of living sculpture, sharing a common heritage with other artistic horticultural and agricultural practices like bonsai, espalier, and topiary, and employing some similar techniques. A unique and distinguishing feature evident in many (but not all) examples of this craft is purposeful inosculation (grafting) of the living trunks, branches, and roots of perennial woody plants to form designed artistic or functional structures.

Designers choose from among various compliant wood-forming plant species and an evolving array of design options, techniques, and tools to guide and shape living wood tissue as it grows, both above and below ground, perhaps bending, pleaching, weaving, twisting, braiding, grafting, framing, molding, controlling light, or pruning to achieve an intended design.

The craft has been practiced for at least several hundred years, as demonstrated by the living root bridges built by the War-Khasi people of India and by the artwork of painter Jean Perréal in 1516. Early 20th century crafters and artisans included American farmers John Krubsack and Axel Erlandson, and German landscape engineer Arthur Wiechula. Contemporary designers include British furniture design professor Dr. Christopher Cattle, the Australian tree-shaping duo of jeweler Peter Cook and artist Becky Northey, and American arborist Richard Reames.

History

The classic Husband and Wife tree; a beech with branches conjoined

Natural inclusion of an existing lamp post; showing reaction wood at and above the tree's root crown

For as long as there have been plants, a botanical phenomenon known as inosculation (or self-grafting) has occurred in nature; whether among parts of a single specimen plant or between two or more individual specimens of the same (or very similar) species. Husband and Wife trees, whether naturally or artificially occurring, are a good example of this. Parts of plants first grow near each other separately, until they touch. Bark on the touching surfaces eventually wears away as wind and other natural phenomena cause abrasion by moving the branches against each other. Once the cambium layers of two live branches are exposed and touching each other, the cambium and other vascular tissues may begin to unite and eventually grow together. New tissue deposition that forms as reaction wood at the point of their union, may appear swollen, not unlike wood galls that form and swell up around the intrusion of gall wasp eggs oviposited in a branch. Nutrient transport activities are merged, including the transfer of sap, water, and minerals, thereby joining the life processes of the parts or of the individual specimens joined. Plants exhibiting this behavior are called inosculate plants. Many contemporary live wood crafters trace their initial inspiration to having seen natural occurrences of this phenomenon.

The earliest known surviving examples of purposeful, human-made inosculation are the living root bridges of Cherrapunji, Laitkynsew, and Nongriat, in the present-day Meghalaya state of northeast India. These suspension bridges are handmade from the aerial roots of living banyan fig trees, such as the rubber tree. The pliable tree roots are gradually trained to grow across a gap, weaving in sticks, stones, and other inclusions, until they take root on the other side. There are specimens spanning over 100 feet. The useful lifespan of the bridges, once complete, is thought to be 500–600 years. They are naturally self-renewing and self-strengthening as the component roots grow thicker.

Structural advantages

Living grown structures are more resistant to decay than harvested ones or those constructed of lumber. While there are some decay organisms that can rot live wood from the outside, and though living woody plants can carry decayed and decaying heartwood inside them; in general, living wood decays from the inside out and dead wood decays from the outside in. Living wood tissue, particularly sapwood, wields a very potent defense against decay from either direction, known as compartmentalization. This protection is stronger in some species than it is in others, but once wood is harvested it is dead and this defense dies with it. Grown structures also have several mechanical structural advantages when compared to structures built using artificial joints and joinery.

Design options

Designs may include abstract, symbolic, or functional elements. Some shapes crafted and grown are purely artistic; perhaps cubes, circles, or letters of an alphabet, while other designs might yield any of a wide variety of useful implements, such as clothes hangers, laundry and wastepaper bins, ladders, furniture, tools, and tool handles. Eye-catching structures such as living fences and jungle gyms can also be grown, and even large architectural designs such as live archways, domes,gazebos, tunnels, rooms, and entire homes are possible with careful planning, planting, and culturing over time. The Human Ecology Design team (H.E.D.) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is designing homes that can be grown from native trees in a variety of climates.

Suitable plants are installed according to design specifications and then cultured over time into intended structures. Some designs may use only living, growing wood to form the structures, while others might also incorporate inclusions such as glass, mirror, steel and stone, any of which might be used either as either structural or aesthetic elements. These can be positioned in a project as it is grown 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.

Time component

Two Leg Tree by Axel Erlandson

The time needed to grow and construct a project depends on many variables, including the size of targeted trees, the growth rate of species chosen for the design, the intended design height, the combination of design options chosen, the individual cultivation details, the local climate conditions, and the specific techniques used.

It is possible to perform initial bending and grafting on a project in an hour, as with Peace in Cherry by Richard Reames, removing supports in as little as a year and following up with minimal pruning thereafter. As little as one season of guiding growth might be enough to form a design, and then longer for the wood to grow and thicken to the desired size. A project might be intended for immediate harvest and drying at design maturity, or instead might remain permanently installed in its original medium for the life of the plants and beyond. Larger designs may take a few to several years to achieve design height and perhaps several more years for the wood caliper to increase to the desired size.

For example, a chair design might take 8 to 10 years to reach maturity and might then either remain growing, as with the living Pooktre garden chair, or perhaps be harvested as a finished work, as with Krubsak's The Chair that Lived. Some component specimens may not grow or survive precisely as planned, so some pieces and even the designs themselves may require adjustment to accommodate the lost components. Taller architectural projects, such as Two Leg Tree by Axel Erlandson, may require 10 years of growth or more to accomplish even the first grafting. Eventually, they all die, since each living plant has a lifespan.

Techniques

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 specimens into a design shape. Plants thus shaped are then held in place for several years until the design is permanently cast. Each specimen'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 trained more gradually while the tree is growing to form the desired shape.

Another technique known as approach grafting may be used, involving the precise wounding of two or more sections of bark and then binding of the wounded parts together securely while they grow together, to purposefully direct and control the natural capacity of woody plant vascular tissue systems to grow together, or inosculate, on extended contact. 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.

Pleaching is a very old horticultural technique involving weaving of branches and twigs, which might be employed to create some design shapes; perhaps fences, lattices, roofs, or walls.. It is most commonly used to train woody plants into raised hedges, though other shapes are easily developed. Some of the outcomes of pleaching can be considered an early form of what is known today as arborsculpture. In an early, labor-intensive, practical use of pleaching, woody plants are installed in the ground in parallel hedgerow lines or quincunx patterns, then shaped by trimming to form a flat plane above ground level. Branches are then woven or joined together at the design height. Their bark is wounded at the joins and bound together until they grow together, forming a raised grid upon which planks can be placed to support structures, perhaps above a floodplain. In late medieval European gardens through the 18th century, pleached allées, interwoven tree-lined garden avenues, were common. The ornamental craft of topiary, the agricultural craft of espalier, and the arboricultural craft of arborsculpture all may have developed from the utilitarian practice of pleaching.

Another technique used is pruning to control and direct growth. Pruning above a leaf node can steer future 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 root culture is yet another technique that might be employed, allowing roots to remain flexible enough to be shaped to form ornamental or functional structures as they grow. According to US Patent No. 7,328,532, tree roots grown aeroponically stay "soft" and so can be trained to grow into desired shapes and forms. Living root bridges have exemplified this technique for several hundred years.

New approaches may allow designers to grow and shape other large structures such as streetlamps, bus stop kiosks, playground equipment, and even homes. Design and setup are fundamental to the success of all such pieces.

Tools

Tools for pruning twigs and branches

Bonsai tools can also be used for pruning

Various materials and tools may be used for creating, shaping, or even molding a project design. For example, a metal patio bench could be used as a design pattern. Lumber, pipe, rope, wire, string, yarn, twine, wire rope, rocks, sandbags, or other weighting objects, tape, and any number of other materials might be useful in effecting the design outcome. Some of the same tools that arborists, bonsai artists, gardeners, and other horticulturists use, are useful here as well, including hand pruners (secateurs), pruning knives, saws, and shovels for planting. Shears and hedge trimmers are used less commonly, being perhaps better suited for establishment and foliage maintenance of topiary or sheared hedges.

Species options

In a given region, any disease and insect resistant species that grow well there, especially thin-barked species that commonly inosculate in nature might be good candidates for shaping. Each species has its own quirks, which can be understood with time and experience. These wood-forming plants are known to inosculate naturally:

• Acer Maple
• Acer negundo Box Elder
• Acer palmatum Japanese Maple
• Alnus Alder
• Betula Birch
• Betula pendula White Birch
• Carpinus Hornbeam
• Cornus Dogwood
• Corylus Hazelnut
• Eucalyptus Eucalyptus
• Eucalyptus camaldulensis River Red Gum
• Fagus Beech
• Ficus Fig
• Ficus microcarpa Curtain Fig
• Fraxinus Ash
• Laburnum Golden Chain
• Lagerstroemia indica Crape myrtle
• Ligustrum Privet
• Malus Apple
• Olea europaea Olive
• Pinus ponderosa Ponderosa pine
• Platanus Sycamore
• Populus Poplar
• Prunus Prunus
• Prunus avium Cherry
• Prunus cerasifera Myrobalan Plum
• Prunus dulcis Almond
• Prunus persica Peach
• Prunus serotina Black Cherry
• Psidium Guava
• Pyrus Pear
• Quercus Oak
• Quercus alnifolia Golden Oak
• Quercus ilex Holm or Holly Oak
• Quercus suber Cork Oak
• Quercus virginiana Live Oak
• Robinia pseudoacacia Locust
• Salix Willow
• Salix alba 'Vitellina' Golden Willow
• Salix babylonica Weeping Willow
• Tectona grandis Teak
• Tilia Linden
• Ulmus Elm
• Vitis Grape
• Wisteria Wisteria

Chronology of notable crafters

Some contemporary artists were aware of and inspired by earlier artists, while others have discovered and developed their craft independently.

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 grass plants 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, 1919

John Krubsack was an American banker and farmer from Embarrass, Wisconsin. He shaped and grafted the first known grown chair, harvesting it in 1914. He lived from 1858 to 1941. He had studied plant grafting and become a skilled found-wood furniture crafter. 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 or 32 of the saplings in a carefully designed pattern in the spring of 1907. In the spring of 1908, the trees had grown to six feet tall and he began training them along a trellis, grafting the branches at critical points to form the parts of his chair. In 1913, he cut all the trees except those forming the legs, which he left to grow and increase in diameter for another year, before harvesting and drying the chair in 1914; eleven years after he started the box elder seeds. Dubbed The Chair that Lived; it is the only known tree shaping that John Krubsack did. The chair is on permanent display in a Plexiglas case at the entrance of Noritage Furniture; the furniture manufacturing business now owned by Krubsack's descendants, Steve and Dennis Krubsack.

Axel Erlandson

Basket Tree by Axel Erlandson

Needle & Thread Tree by Axel Erlandson

Axel Erlandson was a Swedish American farmer who started training trees as a hobby on his farm in Hilmar, California, in 1925. He was inspired by observing a natural sycamore inosculation in his hedgerow. In 1945, he moved his family and the best of his trees from Hilmar to Scotts Valley, California and in 1947, opened an horticultural attraction called the Tree Circus.

Erlandson lived from 1884 to 1964; training more than 70 trees during his lifetime. He considered his methods trade secrets and when asked how he made his trees do this, he would only reply, "I talk to them." His work appeared in the column of Ripley's Believe It or Not! twelve times. 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

19th century botanical sketch by Arthur Wiechula of inosculated branches

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. Weichula never built a living home, but he grew a 394' wall of Canadian poplars to help keep the snow off of a section of train tracks. His illustrated ideas have inspired many other artists' designs.

David Nash

David Nash is a British sculptor, born in 1945 and based in Blaenau Ffestiniog, in Gwynedd, north-west Wales. He is perhaps best known for his sculptures incorporating living elements. In 1977 he installed Ash Dome, 22 ash trees planted in a ring on his property, near his home at Cae'n-y-coed in north Wales. Nearly 30 years later, the work was just taking on the domed form that he had planned for and intended when he first began. In 1985, Nash began work on Divided Oaks, an installation involving some 600 pre-existing trees which he saved from demolition, in a park at the Kröller-Müller Museum, in Otterlo, in The Netherlands. Nash treated these trees with a technique he calls "fletching," which is a term generally used to refer to the structures added to a projectile to improve its flight, such as feathers added for aerodynamic stabilization of an arrow or dart, or fins on a rocket. He simply pushed over and staked down the very small trees. He cut out a series of V-shapes for the larger ones, bent them over, and then wrapped them so the cambium layer could heal over. This stimulated compensating tissue growth in the bent and wounded trees, which are now growing and curving upwards.

Dan Ladd

Dan Ladd is an American sculptor of wood-forming plants. He is based in Florida, where he began experimenting with glass, china, and metal inclusions in trees in 1977 and started planting trees for sculpture in 1978. He became inspired by inosculation he noticed in nature and by the growth of tree trunks around man-made objects such as fences and idle farm equipment. He shapes and grafts living woody plants, including their fruits and their roots, into architectural and geometric forms. Ladd calls human-initiated inosculation 'pleaching' and calls his own work 'tree sculpture'. Ladd binds a variety of objects to trees, for live wood to grow around and incorporate, including teacups, bicycle wheels, headstones, steel spheres, water piping, and electrical conduit. He guides roots into shapes, such as stairs, using above-ground wooden and concrete forms and even shapes woody, hard-shelled Lagenaria gourds by allowing them to grow into detailed molds. 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. His hobby began in 1980 because of his concern the Thailand forests are being ravaged by woodcarvers to the point that one day the industry would eventually carve itself out of existence. He began his first piece, a guava chair, around 1983. Originally intended as something for his children to climb and play on, the piece evolved into a living tree chair. In fifteen years he created six pieces of "living furniture," including five chairs and a table. The Bangkok Post dubbed him the father of Living Furniture. 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. One of his chairs was exhibited in the Growing Village pavilion at the World's Fair Expo 2005 in Nagakute, Aichi, Japan.

Peter Cook and Becky Northey

Person tree, by Peter Cook and Becky Northey.

Artist Peter Cook seated in his living garden chair.

Peter Cook, a jeweler, and Becky Northey, an artist, are an Australian couple who live and shape trees in South East Queensland. In 1988, Cook planted a wattle intended for harvest as a potted plant stand. He had become inspired to grow a chair in 1987 after seeing three fig trees twisting together.Becky Northey joined Cook in 1995. In 1996, after nine years of Cook's experimentation in, they note, "complete isolation from the rest of the world," he and Northey created the name Pooktre to brand their own methods and the artistic works emerging from their creative partnership.

They describe their methods as gently guiding a tree's growth along predetermined wired design pathways over long time periods. They shape growing trees both for living outdoor art and for intentional harvest and the tree species they most often choose for shaping is Myrobalan Plum. Examples of their functional artwork include a growing garden table, a harvested coffee table, hat stands, mirrors, and a gemstone neck piece. They also carve sculptures from trees and they design and grow trees trained in the shape of human beings, which they call people trees.

Cook and Northey exhibited eight of their creations, including two people trees, in the Growing Village pavilion at the World's Fair Expo 2005 in Nagakute, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. Their work was published in the annual book series, Ripley's Believe It or Not.

Richard Reames

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

Richard Reames is an American arborsculptor based in Williams, Oregon, where he manages a nursery, botanical garden, and design studio collectively named Arborsmith Studios. He was inspired by the works of Axel Erlandson, and began sculpting woody plants in 1991 or 1992. By 2007, he had grown over 100 pieces, including chairs and other furniture, sculptures, fences, tool handles, and mailboxes. He began his first experimental grown chairs in the spring of 1993.

In 1995, Reames wrote and published his first book, How to Grow a Chair: The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary. In it, he coined the word arborsculpture.

In 2005, he published his second book, Arborsculpture: Solutions for a Small Planet. His current experimental projects include six plantings intended in 2006 to grow into habitable homes within perhaps ten years. Construction of living buildings is a design process he calls arbortecture. Reames believes that people could, within one generation, be "living in houses where the walls and ceilings are composed of living tree material and there are leaves coming out of the roof." He envisions that living buildings would produce wood, fruit, and flowers to support their occupants and that live wood would grow around windows, doorways, plumbing, and electrical conduits; treating them all as inclusions by engulfing and incorporating them. Reames served as International Coordinator of the Growing Village pavilion at the World Expo 2005 in Japan. He currently lectures worldwide and teaches arborsculpture at the John C. Campbell Folk School.

Christopher Cattle

A grown stool in sycamore by Dr. Chris Cattle

Dr. Christopher Cattle is a retired furniture design professor from England. He started his first planting of furniture in 1996. According to Cattle, he developed an idea to train and graft trees to grow into shapes, which came to him in the late 1970s, in response to questions from students asking how to build furniture using less energy. 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 and at the Big Tent at Falkland Palace in Scotland. He exhibited his grown stools at the World's Fair Expo 2005 in the Growing Village pavilion at Nagakute, Japan.

He aims to encourage as many people as possible to grow their own furniture, and envisions that, "One day, furniture factories could be replaced by furniture orchards." Cattle calls his works grown stools and grown furniture, but also refers to them as grownup furniture, calling them "the result of mature thinking."

Mr. Wu

Mr. Wu is a Chinese pensioner who designs and crafts furniture in Shenyang, Liaoning, China. He has patented his technique of growing wooden chairs and as of 2005, had designed, grown, and harvested one chair, in 2004, and had six more growing in his garden. Wu uses young elm trees, which he says are pliant and do not break easily. He also says that it takes him about five years to grow a tree chair.

Naming of art form

Through out history there has been so few practitioners of this art-form, that there is no standard name. Every artist has a different name for their techniques. "It hasn't got a name: Richard Reames calls it arborsculpture." Ivan Hicks seems to feel the word arborsculpture is unwieldy to pronounce. The first gathering of "accomplished tree shapers" took place at the World Expo 2005 Japan in the Growing Village pavillion.

Related art forms

Other artistic horticultural practices such as bonsai, espalier, and topiary share some elements and a common heritage, though a number of distinctions may be identified.

Bonsai

Bonsai is the art of growing trees or woody plants in containers. Bonsai uses techniques such as pruning, root reduction, and grafting to produce small plants that mimic mature, full-sized trees. Bonsai is not intended for production of useful implements or food, but instead mainly for contemplation by viewers, like most fine art. It is possible to craft a miniature Tree shaping in a bonsai pot and keep it tiny, but if it were intended to be eventually harvested, for example as food, that would contrast with the true nature of bonsai.

Espalier

Espalier is the horticultural and sometimes agricultural practice of controlling woody plant growth by pruning and/or grafting branches so that they grow relatively flat, frequently in formal patterns, against a structure such as a wall, fence, or trellis, and also plants which have been shaped in this way. The practice is commonly used to accelerate and increase fruit production in fruit-bearing plants and also to decorate flat exterior walls while conserving space. Either practice 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.

Topiary

Topiary is the horticultural practice of training of live perennial plants, by clipping the foliage and twigs of trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs to develop and maintain clearly defined shapes, perhaps geometric or fanciful; and plants which have been shaped in this way. The hedge is a simple form of topiary used to create boundaries, walls or screens.

By contrast, tree shaping is primarily the practice of manipulating stems and bonding live wood together to construct objects by grafting and inosculation. It may include some topiary effects, but topiary is not the primary feature and consideration of the practice as a whole. Topiary almost always involves regular shearing and shaping of foliage, whereas Tree shaping can easily be crafted and maintained without shearing.Although it is possible to use grafting for topiary, its use is rare. Also, grown objects such as furniture can be severed from their roots and removed from the ground, while topiary is virtually limited to shaping of the foliage of living trees, shrubs, and woody vines.

Alternative names

Other names for tree shaping include:

• arborsculpture
• biotecture/biotechture
• grown furniture{{rp|21–26}
• living furniture
• pleaching
• tree training
• arbortecture

In arts and literature

In 1516, Jean Perréal painted an allegorical image, la complainte de nature à l'alchimiste errant, (The Lament of Nature to the Wandering Alchemist), in which a winged figure with arms crossed, representing Nature, sits on a tree stump with a fire burning in its base, conversing with an alchemist in an ankle-length coat, standing outside of his stone-laid shoreline laboratory. Live resprouting shoots emerge from either side of the tree stump seat to form a fancifully twined and pleached two-story-tall chair back.

Before 1600, William Shakespeare mentions pleaching in Act 1, Scene 2 of Much Ado About Nothing.

Leonato's brother tells Leonato, "The Prince and Count Claudio, walking in a thick pleached alley in mine orchard, were thus much overheard by a man of mine..."

In 1758, Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic, and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg published Earths in the Universe, in which he wrote of visiting another planet where the residents dwelled in living groves of trees, whose growth they had planned and directed from a very young stage into living quarters and sanctuaries.

In the late 19th century, Styrian Christian mystic and visionary Jakob Lorber published The Household of God. In it, he wrote about the wisdom of planting trees in a circle, because once grown together, the ring of trees would be a much better house than could be built.

See also

• Bonsai
• Coppicing
• Espalier
• Fruit tree pruning
• Pleaching
• Pollarding
• Pruning
• Topiary

Examples

• Fab Tree Hab
• Gilroy Gardens

External links

• Arborsculpture: Installations, history and links
• Extreme nature installations
• History of the Tree Circus
• Tree shapers from around the world, history and links