By Sarah Laskow
SOMETIMES, IF YOU’RE LUCKY, YOU stumble across corner of the world that immediately captures your imagination. Last summer, when I got into the world of tree shaping—the practice of coaxing trees into sculptures and structures, useful and otherwise—I wanted to know everything I could about it. Eventually, I visited and wrote about a small company in England, Full Grown, that is working to grow an entire forest of chairs, tables, and other furniture. But a small mystery remained, one that I couldn’t let go of: What happened to the original “Chair That Grew,” the first chair coaxed from growing trees?
The first person to mention this chair to me was Richard Reames, author of Arborsculpture, who practiced tree shaping for many years. In the first decade of the 20th century, he said, a man named John Krubsack started to grow a chair.
