A Short History of Arborsculpture
Now online at Cabinet Magazine, an interview with arborsculpturist Richard Reames. Using ancient grafting techniques, Reames grows furniture and sculpture from living trees. In this interview, he talks about the origins of arborsculpture, the techniques for growing a chair, and his attempt to grow a living house:
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.
* More on the attempts by Reames and others to build a living house.
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