Designer grows trees into furniture

Armchairs, mirror frames sprout with plenty of care and without chemical weedkillers

Deep in the English countryside, there is a bizarre sight: rows of trees being grown into upside-down chairs, slowly taking shape over years of careful nurturing.

Around 150 armchairs, 100 lampshades and other items including mirror frames are being grown out of the ground in a highly unusual adventure in furniture design.

The venture is the brainchild of Gavin Munro. His Full Grown company has produced some early prototypes, each of which is one solid, jointless piece of wood.

"It's a bit like a vineyard. You've got a few years to get everything up and growing," Munro said.

And it is not simply a case of planting the trees and leaving them to it. There's plenty of give and take between Munro and his plantation.

"They don't grow into chairs on their own. At the same time, you can't force them to do anything they don't want to do otherwise they die back," he said.

The 1-hectare plot of rented farmland is located outside the market town of Wirksworth in rural Derbyshire.

On a farm also containing a microbrewery, a smokery, flower cultivation and plenty of sheep, the rows of trees are growing around blue corrugated plastic frames.

Munro, 40, nurtures them and coaxes them into shape, through years of pruning, coppicing and grafting. Willow can take four to five years to grow into a chair, whereas oak can take up to nine years.

Munro also works with ash, hazel, crab apple and sycamore. "A lot of the stuff we do is Stone Age. Since we were cave men, we were cutting trees down at various heights," he said.

"It's an extension of the natural rhythm. Everything we do is based on what happens anyway and making the subtlest twist to that."

Experiments with chemical weedkiller caused more harm than good, so only organic methods are used. Powdery mildew is kept down with milk, while caterpillars are picked off.

Daily duties involve grounds-keeping and going around the furniture with pruning shears.

"At any given point, there's a branch that's in the right moment to do something, and you've got to find it," Munro said. "For every 100 pieces, there are 1,000 shoots and branches that you want, and 10,000 that you don't. It's not necessarily obvious which one is which."