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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} How to Grow a Chair The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary by Richard Reames How To Grow A Chair: An Interview with Richard Reames. Using ancient grafting techniques and a few basic tools, Richard Reames shapes living trees into furniture and sculpture near his home in Oregon for clients worldwide. He is the author of two self-published books, How to Grow a Chair: The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary with Barbara Delbol, and Arborsculpture: Solutions for a Small Planet, published in June. His work was on display this summer at the World Expo in Aichi, Japan. Joshua Foer spoke to Reames in July 2005 by telephone. richard reames: arborsculpture. ‘I coined the word arborsculpture in 1995 because no single word had been used to recognize this unique art form. a branch of topiary with the potential to savethe environment. there are other words and terms that are used to describe this art. pleaching, permaculture, tree trunk topiary, botanical art, botanical architecture, biotechture, living art, visionary art, and really weird. the difference between my work and that of other topiary artists is that I work with the inside of a tree, from the trunk while most other topiaries are formed from the outside. I love being outside all day, I like experimenting, and I feel that I am perpetuating a remarkable art, one that might some day flourish and produce the most environmentally sensitive houses you could imagine.’ – richard reames. Growing Furniture. Train and graft a tree for half a dozen years or so and you have strong, local, one piece (tree) furniture. One piece wood chairs, no joints. Partially planed. The first chairs are expected to be in galleries mid-2017. by FullGrown, UK. One piece tree chair. The trees are harvested in winter and then allowed to dry before planing. The farm is currently growing furniture in willow, ash, oak and sycamore. FullGrown, Derbyshire, UK. These chairs are grown upside down and the exposed cut trunk (up top) reveals the age of the chair. FullGrown, UK. Gavin Munro uses ancient techniques combined with modern technology to grow, graft, prune and nurture living trees into furniture. The trees are trained to grow over specially made forms, and at certain points they are grafted together so that the chair grows into one solid piece. FullGrown, UK. Gavin pruning a tree table. FullGrown, UK. Amazing one piece tree table. FullGrown, UK. One of the first tree lights. Tree lights growing around molds on the farm. Some lamps and mirror frames will be ready spring of 2016. Tree on form. Good picture showing how back legs are being grafted. The roots will be reused for subsequent chairs. FullGrown, Derbyshire, UK. This is how Gavin first grew his chairs. Starting with four willow plants, one as each leg. He later changed it so that one stem as the source of the whole chair. Their first chair was made from Willow (Salix Viminalis). See a video about Gavin’s work here: inspirationgreen.com/growing-chairs FullGrown, UK. Chair of pear wood from a production orchard. Years of pruning created this shape. For sale, Wolfheze, Netherlands. onthout.nl. Tree Stool grown Dr Cattle gives lessons on stool growing. Dr Christopher Cattle. Upside down willow chair. Branches growing from a willow trunk formed into legs. Trunk was cut and then legs bound and chair inverted. By Dutch designer Floris Wubben. Chair Farm by Warner Aisslinger, Berlin. Willow grown in a steel frame in an agricultural lab. aisslinger.de. I would imagine the wooden seat will eventually crack. Found on pinterest, no source. How to Grow a Chair: An Interview with Richard Reames. Using ancient grafting techniques and a few basic tools, Richard Reames shapes living trees into furniture and sculpture near his ho​me in Oregon for clients worldwide. He is the author of two self-published books, How to Grow a Chair: The Art of Tree Trunk Topiary with Barbara Delbol, and Arborsculpture: Solutions for a Small Planet , published in June. His work was on display this summer at the World Expo in Aichi, Japan. Joshua Foer spoke to Reames in July 2005 by telephone. Joshua Foer: How does arborsculpture differ from bonsai or topiary? Richard Reames: Arborsculpture is the art of shaping tree trunks to create art and functional items through bending, grafting, pruning, and multiple planting. Bonsai is the art of miniaturizing trees. Some of bonsas basic techniques, such as bending branches and pruning, are similar to arborsculpture. Topiary was originally defined as ornamental gardening, so you could say, to be technical, that arborsculpture is a branch of topiary, but the word topiary is more commonly used to describe the shaping of foliage. In that sense, topiary is almost the opposite of arborsculpture in that you’re only trimming the foliage, whereas in arborsculpture, you’re only working with the trunk. Of the various tree arts, arborsculpture is most closely related to espalier , a technique that began in France as a way to grow quality fruit in small areas, like inside castle courtyards. They’d grow fruit trees up against the wall and shape the branches so that they were evenly spaced and parallel, maximizing the amount of fresh air to each piece of fruit. I like to say that arborsculpture is like espalier on acid. Tell me about some of the arborsculptures you’ve grown. I have grown many chairs and benches. I have a 30-foot spiral poplar tree that goes up 8 feet, splits into two trunks that spiral around each other, and then is grafted back together at about 16 feet high. I have a nice spiral staircase growing right now in oak. I planted a circle of birch trees years ago and just recently spun them all clockwise a few feet and grafted the tops together. It’s a small gazebo. Can you walk me through how you’d grow a chair? For a chair, I select perhaps a dozen flexible, long, unbranched saplings and I plant them in a pattern. I can then bend them along a frame into the shape of a chair or a bench and do the initial grafting. The majority of the work can be done all at once. The frame holds the trees for a few years until the tree casts that form through its growth. It’s just a matter of the trees getting older and growing together with some gentle pruning to keep them growing in the right direction. You’re also trying to grow a boat. That’s a collaboration with a friend. We planted two very long ash trees that arch up at the ends. They form the bottom of the boat. Then we planted rib trees so that the planking can be fastened on. That project is intended to be harvested once it’s thick enough. At first we projected it would take five years, but I’m guessing it’ll be more like eight. While the boat may be functional, much of what you grow is purely sculptural. What are the aesthetic criteria by which an arborsculpture is judged? I think balance is the number one criterion. Learning how to create symmetrical growth is the key to creating a good arborsculpture. Say you’re going to use four trees; if you can get them to grow at the same rate, then you have even balance. To achieve even growth, you either have to limit the fast-growing trees or speed up the slower-growing ones. Also critical is the way the grafts heal. That’s where the true mystery and power of this art lies. Given that arborsculpture requires only the most primitive tools, it seems like it should have been invented a long time ago. Why wasn’t it? That’s a question I often wonder about. Perhaps the Druids were great tree-shapers, but since wood doesn’t preserve well, the evidence may have rotted long ago. Even though arborsculpture didn’t have a name until I coined the term in 1995, there are historical examples of tree-shaping. The oldest evidence we have is a five-by-seven inch illumination from 1516 by Jean Perréal, titled Nature Objects to the Alchemist’s Errors . In the painting, an angel is sitting in an elaborately shaped, grafted tree. She has folded arms and is chastising the alchemist, who does not look pleased. Perréal’s illumination accompanied a new version of Roman de la Rose , an allegory of chivalric love that is considered one of the greatest literary works of the thirteenth century. Tell me about some of the early practitioners of arborsculpture. In one of his books, Earths in the Universe , the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg wrote about visiting another planet whose inhabitants dwelled in living trees. He talked about how they would shape these trees from a very young stage and guide their growth into temples. Later, a nineteenth-century Austrian mystic named Jakob Lorber wrote a book called The Household of God about the wisdom of planting trees in a circle. Once they had grown together, Lorber said, the ring of trees would be a much better house than anything anyone could build. Did Swedenborg or Lorber ever grow an arborsculpture? No, they didn’t. There were three modern pioneers of arborsculpture: John Krubsack, Arthur Wiechula, and Axel Erlandson. Krubsack was a prominent banker in the small town of Embarrass, Wisconsin, at the turn of the last century. He grew an extraordinary chair out of box elder that was shown at the 1915 World’s Fair. In 1926, Wiechula, a German agricultural engineer, published a radical little book called Developing Houses from Living Trees .

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