Living, Growing Architecture

An absolutely fascinating post (with lots of great photos). Those two bridges you see there?… Those are not bridges made out of branches. Those are living trees, literally grown together to form a bridge.

Plants are amazing: they provide food, air, medicine, and material for buildings, furniture, and art. But through an ancient yet obscure craft, still-living plants can themselves be shaped into bridges, tables, ladders, chairs, sculptures - even buildings. Known variously as botanical architecture, tree sculpture, tree-shaping, tree-grafting, pooktre, arborsculpture, and arbortecture, the craft is, essentially, construction with living plants.

[found via my good friend Darrin’s awesome blog]