Grow Your Own Furniture This story reminded me of the "draw your own furniture" post earlier, and to a lesser extent, the "drawing trees" post.

Cristopher Cattle in the United Kingdom has come up with a way to train trees / plants to make furniture for you. He has an online guide showing how to make a stool from 3 Sycamores. It's not as convenient as popping into your local furniture store for a few stools, as it takes about five years to grow into a strong enough stool. But it's a pretty cool combination of craft, art, and nature.

Here's why Grown-Furniture.co.uk thinks it is a good idea..
Growing furniture isn't going to save the planet, but it can be used to demonstrate that it is possible to create genuinely useful things without adding to the pollution that industry inevitably seems to produce. Trees are self-generating, and grown wooden products need only the energy that the sun gives everywhere. It's free and it's non-polluting. Training and grafting trees as they grow are established traditional crafts, and wood is durable but it's also biodegradable, so it doesn't have to end up in a hole in the ground. I call this Grownup furniture as it's the result of mature thinking. Grown Furniture

I found this story over at the boingboing directory of wonderful, often useless, and mostly interesting things!
>> General Arts  ¶ 2:23 AM