Experimental Structures

Last week, the Mountain Man came down from his Eden to help us build a shade structure for our garden.

Of the various hairy young men "going back to the land" around here, Mountain Man is probably the hairiest, and probably also the most prepared for the rugged life he's chosen. He began with a piece of land and a wood stove that he rolled up the mountain all by himself. Now, his kingdom includes a self-built cabin, a fully occupied hen house, productive gardens, and a hammock from which to survey his domain.

I love Mountain Man's forest home. Terraced gardens spill a profusion of vegetables down the mountainside. Carved men sprawl like Rip van Winkel under spruce trees. The cabin itself - built by hand without a plan - is decorated with shells, stones, bits of tin, pressed into stucco, pretty as jewels. Mountain Man sees every scrap of material as a possibility. Any other man's junk becomes his treasure. I have never before seen a home that is such a perfect externalization of its owner's interior state.

So when the Farmer suggested we ask Mountain Man to teach us how to build with felled saplings, I was pretty enthusiastic. I'd wanted to build a simple "teepee" shape out of poles for my Scarlet Runner beans to grow on - mainly to give the children a shady respite on hot gardening days. But Mountain Man's experiments with tree weaving had produced structures that were much more beautiful, useful, and long-lasting.

Helpfully, the Universe had provided us with a convenient cache of materials, in the form of about forty felled maple saplings our neighbour had cleared away from his "view" in the spring. Unable to find time to burn the brush, he was happy to let us drag them away (though doubtless a bit puzzled). WWOOFer Ashley (from England), the Farmer, my middle son (Farmer-in-Training), my youngest son (The Fireman), Mountain Man and I met in the garden to begin construction.

Mountain Man began by planting two saplings about one and a half feet deep, directly across from each other. He then bent the tops towards each other and twisted the branches together. To my surprise, they held easily. It seemed to me that their natural springiness would make it difficult to join them, but they twined together like teenagers at a dance. After that, "construction" became a matter of planting more trees around the perimeter of the circle, bending the tops down, and joining them as before. Smaller saplings were woven horizontally through the uprights.

When I asked Mountain Man to explain his technique, he replied, "I just kinda let the tree tell me what it wants to do."

The resulting structure looks a lot like a giant basket, and already provides a great deal of shade. I can't wait to see what it will look like with a covering of red-blossomed runner beans. My only disappointment is that you can't build a permanent home this way. What a way to build! No blueprints to squint at, no nails to drive, no angles to join, no math to do - a completely intuitional way of creating.

There's a lesson here, I just know it, although I'm trying hard to just enjoy my shade house for what it is, rather than trying to make it stand for some gigantic philosophical tangent I'm taking. I think it's a reminder of what can happen when we don't demand utter control over things, when we let circumstances and the materials at hand dictate our path. When we let the tree tell us what it wants to do.