What do you grow on the beds? Probably about the same as all the other gardeners: radishes, carrots, onions, cucumbers and tomatoes. But the British Gavin Munro, designer and founder of Full Grown, grows chairs, armchairs, lamps and other interior items on his beds.
His furniture garden Gavin broke in 2008, planting three thousand trees. And in 2015 he took the first “harvest” – 30 lampshades for lamps. And although the price for grown items rather big – such a chair will cost quite expensive, all growing now chairs and other things are already booked until 2024.
The process of creating furniture is long: for example, to grow a chair, it will take almost ten years. The shape is set by specially designed plastic frames. Then the tree-chair is cut down, and details are brought – all necessary surfaces are polished and covered with oil.
The idea of creating bionic self-growing furniture came to Gavin Munro on the basis of his own experience. As a child, the future designer suffered from a curvature of the spine. The boy underwent several operations and spent a long time in a special metal corset-frame, which formed his back smooth. Watching during the disease for what bizarre shapes can take trees, Gavin Munro decided to try to give them the curves corresponding to the conceived design, artificially.
But this idea is not new: even the ancient Egyptians used to make furniture elements, the shape of which was given while the tree was still growing.
In India, near the city of Cherapunji, Meghalaya, locals traditionally build bridges from the aerial roots of rubber-bearing ficus. Today, living root bridges continue to be used and have become a local landmark, which is certainly visited by tourists. And not only bridges, but also other facilities – for example, the stands of the local football stadium.
There is a whole direction of modern art – arbosculpture and arboarchitecture in which living plants are used as structural elements.
One of the masters of Botanical construction or building botany — German architect and doctor of philosophy Ferdinand Ludwig, founder of the direction of baubotanic and architectural Bureau Ludwig.Schoenle.
He develops a completely new concept of construction, departed from the canons of previous anthropocentric methods of construction. In their works, architects-botanists design not only the construction and existence of the object, but also its natural death – after all, a significant part of the structural elements of bridges, pavilions and towers built by the Ludwig Bureau.Schoenle, made up of living trees.
And if you are patient, you may want to test your strength in the synthesis of creativity of the architect and gardener, trying to grow a chair, a gazebo or a living garden sculpture.