About Arborscupture

“… All my plant sculptures have been developed in pots.

Containers, while limiting the size of the sculpture, allow freedom of movement so the living plant can be exhibited in remote locations. Traditionally work of this nature is grown in the ground and moveable only when dormant. I have used evergreen hardwood trees including Olive, Casuarina, Lillypilly and Bay Laurel with the crowns pruned as conventional topiary.”

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Beginnings

My wife Caroline and I started our nursery business in Central Victoria in 1986. We moved to the present site in the town of St. Arnaud in late 1987 and have been growing and trading on the site since then.

Originally our nursery, North Central Farm Trees, as the name implies produced tube stock for on-farm planting. By request and growing demand, we started to grow and stock hardy green life suited to this region.

Environments

Our emphasis has always been on the plants and the environment they can create. We only use and stock a limited range of environmentally friendly solutions to pest and diseases. The nursery is a world without registered chemicals and teeming with life including frogs, lizards, native birds and predatory insects.

Designed gardens can offer so much more than a habitat for wildlife. they can also greatly enhance the livability for the gardener. They can provide an ever changing sensual tapestry of colour, perfume and texture. More importantly they create a microclimate that can buffer a residence from the extremes of climate.

Pools of shade from trees and shrubs limit the ground temperature from exceeding air temperature in the summer. The resulting microclimate cools faster overnight and with less heat radiation on buildings during the day, you save more energy in cooling. Those same plants can limit wind exposure and evaporative wind chill in winter. This leads to a warmer microclimate in winter and a reduction in heating required.

My Trees

Inspired by my grandfather’s love of gardening and his wonderful espaliered fruit trees, I decided to play with the concept of manipulating tree stems to create different topiary. I believe the name “arborsculpture”, as coined by Richard Reames of arborsmith.com, is the most accurate description of this style of plant culture.

Primarily producing these arbosculptures in pots has allowed for the ability to transport and exhibit them. In the past my arbosculptures have exhibited at Sydney in Bloom (2004) and Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (2005).

Consepts I have explored in shaping these trees follow an evolutionary path where one thing leads to another. The expression “nothing new under the sun” is most appropriate here as arboscuplture merely seeks to redefine a process that occurs commonly in nature. The most common of these processes is inosculence which is a term that describes natural self-grafting. This occurs most commonly on root systems where roots cross but have insufficient room to grow around each other. The active cambial layer fuse together so as to produce a natural grafted union.

There is only one way to tie a reef knot and only a few techniques of plaiting. Not all plants are capable of self inosculence and even fewer capable of joining this way with another species of the same plant and less still another genus. Manual grafting can also be employed along with techniques to encourage inosculence. What is required most of all is patience.

Arborscuplture is not the pastime for those who want a result today, tomorrow or even next year. We can all learn to propagate and nurture seeds and cuttings and grow whatever we desire, but most people don’t have the time. The nursery industry caters for gardener’s impatience and curiosity. Buying mature specimens is a unique opportunity to buy back years of your life rather than say “if only I had the time”.