Arley Hall, Northwich, Cheshire in Northern England

Pleaching isn’t hard, but it does require training the plants early. There aren’t many North American trees that pleach well so if you’re looking to do it, you’d likely want to check with an arborist to ensure your work pays off.

Pleached apple trees

Trees that have pliable branches are the best to use and include apple, linden and hawthorn trees. The picture above is of a bunch of apple trees pleached to form a pathway.

Pleaching trees and hedges

To make the hedge above, the specimens should be planted 4-5 feet apart . The lower part of the trunk shouldn’t have any branches on it. You’ll tie jute twine between the trees to be a guide for the branches to grow together. After the plants grow and thicken, you can get rid of the twine and you’ll have a living wall.

Espalier services shows a conservatory at Longwood Gardens which uses the espalier technique to grow the plant along a wire fence to make the rooms of the large building more intimate. Espalier is the art of make plants into 2D objects instead of 3D. You can also make this wall out of certain types of fruit trees which has the benefit of allowing you to pick fruit right off the wall.

Indoor espalier fence

Here are three apple trees at Longwood Gardens again made into u-shaped espaliers. It saves space as they’re grown flat against the wall and allows you to pick the fruit easily. Below shows espaliers on a larger scale. The first shows the setup began its first tier at 4 ft high to create the living fence. The second is two years later.

Espalier rows living fence

Espalier rows

Here’s a few more espaliers from Gus&otherthings showing them used as a living fence and directly against a wall as a vertical garden.

Espalier living walls

Espalier green walls

Espalier living fence

Green Wall Tower

Baubotanical research covers designing load bearing architectural construction using living plants that slowly evolve over time into strong, fully grown trees. This is different from installing living fences or green screens or curtains in that the trees will support heavy structures. The tower above was made of hundreds of young 6 foot tall plants. The plants at the bottom of the tower are in the soil while the rest are planted in containers going up the structure. The containers are resting on temporary steel scaffolding which will be removed once the trees are strong enough to support the platforms themselves. The purpose of the multiple plantings is to speed up the growing process. Just using the trees on the ground might take several decades for them to be tall and strong enough to perform the purpose, but by growing them on multiple layers, the trees can be grafted into each other to grow to be one organism. Using this technique, the growth time is shortened to between 8-10 years. via Science Daily.

That idea would help further a project thought up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Team H.E.D. [Human Ecology Design] including Mitchell Joachim, Ph.D., Lara Greden, Ph.D. and Javier Arbona, M.S.: Fab Tree Hab.

Fab Tree Hab

The Fab Tree Hab is designed to be grown out of native trees and grafted into shape by reusable scaffolding. The trees would involve arboreal farming and production and keep accountable of the life cycle of the dwelling as a whole. You can see from the image the large trees would be the main frame and support for the house, but even the walls would be made up primarily of living trees.

Fab Tree Hab

That thick green weave you see in the picture would be created from pleaching the trees together. Pleaching is an older technique of encouraging trees to grow into each other by weaving tree branches to create lattices or green screens. Elm, Live Oak and Dogwood would be used as the main load bearing trees and their branches would be weaved together to help form the lattice. It would be helped by vines as well as plants grown in pockets of soil throughout the wall. The overall process would create a dense foliage for the walls.

Fab Tree Hab

Water would be the heart of the structure. It would be collected in a basin in the roof, used by humans and would leave by transpiration. The water would have two streams: one would water the garden and the other would be filtered by a living filter consisting of beneficial bacteria, fish (like in aquaponics) and plants (the roots of the plants help clean the water).  The water used by the housing vegetation eventually evaporates which cools the home.