Full Grown is a UK company that grows trees into chairs, sculptures, lamps, mirror frames and tables. It was co-founded by Gavin Munro in 2005.

History

In 2005 with a £5,000 investment Gavin Munro started to experiment with willow to grow chairs. The original idea came from Gavin's childhood memory of an overgrown

bonsai Bonsai (; , ) is the Japanese art of Horticulture, growing and shaping miniature trees in containers, with a long documented history of influences and native Japanese development over a thousand years, and with unique aesthetics, cultural hist ...

that looked like a small throne. The inspiration lead to growing trees into chairs, sculptures, lamps, mirror frames and tables. The idea of growing trees for 50 years then cut them into small pieces glue together in ways that can only ever fall apart didn't seem to make much sense. Better to grow the trees into one solid piece. For example, a chair or a light shade. Ideally the tree would have the ability to re-shoot and in this way yield furniture the way an apple tree in an orchard does. Working together with his wife Alice Munro. The concept is to train young trees to grow over plastic molds until maturity. Thereby creating no wood waste. This process can take up to eight years to mature. 2006 Full Grown started planting trees to grow furniture. On a 2.5 acre field around 3,000 trees have been planted with production getting underway in late 2011. The first prototype, The Vaila Chair, was revealed in a TEDx talk in Derby in 2014.

Gavin Munro

Gavin Munro was born in Matlock England. He studied furniture design. He created driftwood furniture while in San Francisco. Munro's mother in-law allowed the first prototypes of chairs to be grown in her garden. He co-founded Full Grown and is the managing director.

Full Grown in 2017

In a two-acre field north of Derby Full Grown is currently tending 400 trees. They are only making 50 or so pieces a year. The first batch was to be harvested in 2015 The bulk of the pre-orders are from outside the UK, most in France and the US with some orders from London, Hong Kong, Germany and Spain, though they will need to have patience as the grown chairs may take as long as 10 years before they are harvested, dried and finished. Full Grown are using

permaculture Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using Systems theory, whole-systems thinking. It applies t ...

ideas to help with pest control and tending the field.

Design

The chairs are based on 18th century "

Shaker Shaker or Shakers may refer to: Religious groups * Shakers, a historically significant Christian sect * Indian Shakers, a smaller Christian denomination Objects and instruments * Shaker (musical instrument), an indirect struck idiophone * Cock ...

" with some mid-century Scandinavian design centering around the idea the function is intrinsic to usefulness. The chairs are grown upside down.

Process of
tree shaping 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 ...

The trees are trained along pre-defined routes following a blue plastic mold. The growing tip is shaped and held in place with small plastic clasps. The trees are gently manipulated to create the exact shape of chairs, tables, mirror frames or lamps. You can't force the trees as a tortured branch dies back and will reshoot elsewhere. The shaping can be inch-by-inch over the span of a few years. One tree has been planted specifically to grow each piece. Some of the pieces use grafting as part of the design. This process of growing the piece take somewhere between 4–8 years. During this time a piece thickens and matures before being harvested in the winter. Over several months the pieces are dried and seasoned. They are planed, cleaned back and polished to show the wood grain.

Items growing/grown

Chairs A chair is a type of seat, typically designed for one person and consisting of one or more legs, a flat or slightly angled seat and a back-rest. It may be made of wood, metal, or synthetic materials, and may be padded or Upholstery, upholstered ...

* Tables *

Lampshades A lampshade is a fixture that envelops the Electric light, light bulb to redirect the light it emits. The shade is often affixed onto a light fixture to reduce the intensity of the light to observers, shield the light from a harsh environment, ...

* Mirror frames

Tree types

Gavin Munro’s company Full Grown uses the following species of trees: They mainly use willow as it grows fast and is relatively easy to work with. They like the idea of offering other varieties such as cherry, oak and Gavins personal choice of ash. Partly to give a range of choice for customers and also to spread the risk of disease. Ash is very prone to fungal disease and die back." To grow a finished chair takes about four to five years with willow. It can take nine or more years to grow a chair in oak. * Ash *

Willow Willows, also called sallows and osiers, of the genus ''Salix'', comprise around 350 species (plus numerous hybrids) of typically deciduous trees and shrubs, found primarily on moist soils in cold and temperate regions. Most species are known ...

Oak An oak is a hardwood tree or shrub in the genus ''Quercus'' of the beech family. They have spirally arranged leaves, often with lobed edges, and a nut called an acorn, borne within a cup. The genus is widely distributed in the Northern Hemisp ...

Sessile oak ''Quercus petraea'', commonly known as the sessile oak, Welsh oak, Cornish oak, Irish oak or durmast oak, is a species of oak tree native to most of Europe and into Anatolia and Iran. The sessile oak is the national tree of Ireland, and an unof ...

Red oak ''Quercus'' subgenus ''Quercus'' is one of the two subgenera into which the genus ''Quercus'' was divided in a 2017 classification (the other being subgenus ''Cerris''). It contains about 190 species divided among five sections. It may be calle ...

Sycamore Sycamore is a name which has been applied to several types of trees, but with somewhat similar leaf forms. The name derives from the Ancient Greek () meaning . Species of otherwise unrelated trees known as sycamore: * ''Acer pseudoplatanus'', a ...

Crab apple ''Malus'' ( or ) is a genus of about 32–57 species of small deciduous trees or shrubs in the family Rosaceae, including the domesticated orchard apple, crab apples (sometimes known in North America as crabapples) and wild apples. The genus i ...

Hazel Hazels are plants of the genus ''Corylus'' of deciduous trees and large shrubs native to the temperate Northern Hemisphere. The genus is usually placed in the birch family, Betulaceae,Germplasmgobills Information Network''Corylus''Rushforth, K ...

Full Grown had originally used saplings as the base of the tree, but seeing only 1 out of 50 manifests properly, they have switched to using

coppicing Coppicing is the traditional method in woodland management of cutting down a tree to a tree stump, stump, which in many species encourages new Shoot (botany), shoots to grow from the stump or roots, thus ultimately regrowing the tree. A forest ...

in 2011.

References

External links

*{{Official website, https://fullgrown.co.uk/about-us-full-grown/ British furniture makers Forestry in the United Kingdom Tree shaping