Vine Twisted Trees Into Natural Furniture Art

Hi Y’all,

It was a beautiful weekend here on the farm, so my homesteading instincts kicked it. I had some cleaning up to do near one of the streams and I’m always seeing more than just firewood when I cut down a tree.

On the fringes of where the forest meets up with open pastures we get a lot of vines, everything from poison Ivy, bittersweet, passion flower, muscadine and honeysuckles. As the vines grow into the trees they wind around the trunks, branches and limbs, and can even kill the trees. Honeysuckle vines are an invasive species from Japan but has become extremely prominent in the Appalachian Mountains and throughout the eastern United States.

Over time, the tree is deformed and distorted from the vines. The vines have no elasticity so the tree has two options, it can either suffer from the vine cutting off sap flow, this killing the tree, or the tree will naturally direct the flow through the same spiral direction of the vine and grow through it.

These natural stresses on the tree can create some of the most beautiful swirls and patterns, but they’re not always easy to find abundantly. This makes them rare. This also lends opportunity for someone like me to find a use for natures art. Sadly most of these distorted trees I find in the forest are already dead or dying and can’t be used.

The first steps to building furniture from these gems of living nature is the preparation. Peeling the bark gently so the natural form isn’t altered takes patience, timing, and a lot of work. It’s therapy for me when I need my mind to focus on something other than my normal routine.

You’ll hopefully get some useful hints from this video. Maybe you could start with a walking stick or just a small decorative stick you enjoy looking at. I’ve allowed my passion for natural wood scarring to become an obsession that just keeps consuming my passion for art on the most natural level.

The tree I’m peeling in this video is a sassafras. It’s one of the best finds when I hunt for twisted material. But I am also fond of other species such as maple, hickory, locust, dogwood, poplar, sourwood and beech.

There will be a follow up video in the near future with the building of a chair, table, and other creations using scarred, stressed, distorted trees. I appreciate the elegant forms of rustic furniture components when they fit into a piece that will be cherished a lifetime or two.