Arborsculpture

Tree shaping (also known by several other alternative names) uses living trees and other woody plants as the medium to create structures and art. There are a few different methods used by the various artists to shape their trees, which share a common heritage with other artistic horticultural and agricultural practices, such as pleaching, bonsai, espalier, and topiary, and employing some similar techniques. Most artists use grafting to deliberately induce the inosculation of living trunks, branches, and roots, into artistic designs or functional structures.

Tree shaping has been practiced for at least several hundred years, as demonstrated by the living root bridges built and maintained by the Khasi people of India. Early 20th century practitioners and artisans included banker John Krubsack, Axel Erlandson with his famous circus trees, and landscape engineer Arthur Wiechula. Several contemporary designers also produce tree shaping projects.

History

Some species of trees exhibit a botanical phenomenon known as inosculation (or self-grafting); whether among parts of a single tree or between two or more individual specimens of the same (or very similar) species. Trees exhibiting this behavior are called inosculate trees.

The living root bridges of Cherrapunji, Laitkynsew, and Nongriat, in the present-day Meghalaya state of northeast India are examples of tree shaping. 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 shaped to grow across a gap, weaving in sticks, stones, and other inclusions, until they take root on the other side. This process can take up to fifteen years to complete. There are specimens spanning over 100 feet, some can hold up to the weight of 50 people. 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.

Living trees were used to create garden houses in the Middle East, a practice which later spread to Europe. In Cobham, Kent there are accounts of a three-story house that could hold 50 people.Title Turning young trees into living works of art Date 31 August 2014 Publisher Sunday Observer (Sri Lanka, India) HT Digital Streams Ltd.

Pleaching is a technique used in the very old horticultural practice of hedge laying. Pleaching consists of first plashing living branches and twigs and then weaving them together to promote their inosculation. It is most commonly used to train trees into raised hedges, though other shapes are easily developed. Useful implementations include fences, lattices, roofs, and walls. Some of the outcomes of pleaching can be considered an early form of what is known today as tree shaping. In an early, labor-intensive, practical use of pleaching in medieval Europe, trees were installed in the ground in parallel hedgerow lines or quincunx patterns, then shaped by trimming to form a flat-plane grid above ground level. When the trees' branches in this grid met those of neighboring trees, they were grafted together. Once the network of joints were of substantial size, builders laid planks across the grid, upon which they built huts to live in, thus keeping the human settlement safe in times of annual flooding. Wooden dancing platforms were also built and the living tree branch grid bore the weight of the platform and dancers.

In late medieval European gardens through the 18th century, pleached allées, interwoven canopies of tree-lined garden avenues, were common.

Methods

There are a few different methods of shaping a tree. There is aeroponic culture, instant tree shaping and gradual tree shaping.

Aeroponic culture uses aeroponics, a process of growing tree roots in a nutrient rich mist. Once the roots are of a desired length for the pre-determined design they are shaped as they are planted. This technique may be used in part to help form large permanent structures, such as eco-architecture.
The oldest known root shaping are the living root bridges built by the ancient War-Khasi people of the Cherrapunjee region in India.

Instant tree shaping uses trees . The trees are bent and woven into different designs and held until cast. Bends are then held in place for several years until their form is permanently cast. With this method it is possible to perform initial bending and grafting on a project in an hour, as with ''Peace in Cherry'' by Richard Reames,
Some techniques of this method are bending, and un-localizing the bend. Ring barking is sometimes employed to help balance a design. Creasing is folding trees such as willow and poplar over upon themselves.

Gradual tree shaping starts with designing and framing. Young seedlings or saplings 3–12 in. (7.6–30.5 cm) long are planted. The growth is guided along predetermined design pathways; this may be a wooden jig or a complex wire design. The shaping zone is a small area just behind the growing tip that forms the final shape.
This zone requires day to day or weekly guiding of the new growth. To achieve a finish piece takes longer this way, than with the other methods. A chair design might take 8 to 10 years to reach maturity. Some of Axel Erlandson's trees took 40 years to assume their finished shapes.

Common techniques

Some techniques are common to all the above methods though sometimes they are used differently for each.

Framing might consist of a combination or any one of several materials, including the tree itself, living or dead.

Grafting is a commonly employed technique that exploits the natural biological process of inosculation. A branch or plant is cut and a piece of another plant is added and held in place. Grafting is applied to create permanent connections and joints.

Pruning can be used to balance a design by controlling and directing growth into a desired shape.

Timing is used as part of the construction is intrinsic to achieving this art form.

Structure

Living grown structures have a number of structural mechanical advantages over those constructed of lumber and are more resistant to decay. While there are some decay organisms that can rot live wood from the outside, and though living trees can carry decayed and decaying heartwood inside them; in general, living trees decay 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 applies to living trees only and varies among species.

Growing structures is not as easy as it would seem. Quick growing willows have been used to grow building structures, they provide support or protection. A young group of German architects are in the process of such a structure and they are continually monitored and checked. Once the trees are of age to be able to take on load-bearing weight they are tested for stability and strength by a structural engineer. Once this is approved the supporting framework is removed. Projects are limited to the trees' weight loading ability and growth. This is being studied and the load capacity will be proved by testing on prototypes.

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 shapes, such as clothes hangers, laundry and wastepaper bins, ladders, furniture, Note large file: 8.04MB 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, and theoretically 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 trees 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. Inclusions 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.

The befit of using trees to grow a design which is then harvested for furniture, is that these pieces are stronger than the results of conventional manufacturing process. As the grain of the timber flows through the design instead of being chopped into smaller pieces then glued back together to form the design. All the joins of a shaped tree are grafted forming a stronger bond than a manufactured piece.

Environmental benefits

Shaped tree projects can play a role in mitigating the imbalance of carbon dioxide-oxygen that happens in cities, creating a microclimate that could be soothing to human habitation. The types of projects that could work in this environment would be playground equipment, road furniture, walkways with over-bridges and bus shelters. This increased growth of trees would improve the shade and create a fresh wind channel. When choosing the trees to use a fruit tree would have the added use of giving food as well. It can be renewable in the long run and when they die they can be used as fertilizer.

The trees and shaped roots can hold the soil preventing soil erosion and forestalling landslides. In the right circumstances the trees could be planted over landfills and garbage dumps. Biodegradable waste could be used to help the trees remain healthily.

Chronology of notable practitioners

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, harvesting it in 1914. He lived from 1858 to 1941. He had studied tree 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 went on tour via several exhibituions around the US and was featured in ''Ripley's Believe It or Not!''. 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

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

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.

Dan Ladd

Dan Ladd is a Northampton, Massachusetts based American artist who works with trees and gourds. He began experimenting with glass, china, and metal inclusions in trees in 1977 in Vermont and started planting trees for Extreme Nature 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 trees, 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 be incorporated, 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 gourd

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