About

Beginnings

My wife Caroline and I started our nursery business in Central Victoria in 1986. We moved to the present site in the town of St. Arnaud in late 1987 and having been growing and trading on site since then.

Originally our nursery, North Central Farm Trees, as the name implies produced tubestock for on-farm planting. By request and growing demand we started to grow and stock a range of hardy Greenlife suited to this region.

Environments

Our emphasis has always been on the plants and the environment they can create. We only use and stock a limited range of environmentally friendly solutions to pests and diseases. The nursery is a world without registered chemicals and teeming with life including frogs, lizards, native birds and predatory insects.

Designed gardens can offer so much more than a habitat for wildlife. They can also greatly enhance the liveability for the gardener. They can provide an ever changing sensual tapestry of colour, perfume and texture. More importantly they create a microclimate that can buffer a residence from the extremes of climate.

Pools of shade, both from trees and shrubs, limit the ground temperature from exceeding air temperature in the summer. The resulting microclimate cools faster overnight with less heat radiation on buildings during the day saving energy in cooling. Those same plants can limit wind exposure and evaporative wind chill in the winter leading to a warmer microclimate and reduction in heating required. This is evidenced at our nursery where we up to 6 degrees cooler in the summer and up to 4 degrees warmer in the winter.

My Trees

Inspired by my grandfather’s love of gardening and his wonderful espaliered fruit trees I decided to play with the concept of manipulating tree stems to create something more than the average “lollypop” topiary. I believe the name “Arborsculpture” as coined by Richard Reames of arborsmith.com is the most accurate description of this style of plant culture.
As we primarily produce container grown plants all my plant sculptures have been developed in pots. Containers, while limiting the size of the sculpture, allow freedom of movement so the living plant can be exhibited in remote locations. This has allowed us, in the past, to exhibit my work and we have installed exhibition gardens at both Sydney In Bloom (2004) and Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show (2005).

Traditionally work of this nature is grown in the ground and moveable only when dormant or dead. I have used evergreen hardwood trees including Olive, Casuarina, Acmena and Bay Laurel with the crowns pruned as conventional topiary.

Although many of the trees exhibited on these pages began their lives as early as 1990 or shortly after, container life and adversities such as 13 years of drought have restricted growth in a way they may not, perhaps have experienced, if grown in the ground. As container plants treated as topiary they have also periodically had quite severe root pruning to refresh and renew.

Concepts I have explored in shaping these trees follow an evolutionary path where one thing leads to another. The expression “nothing new under the sun” is most appropriate here as Arborsculpture merely seeks to redefine a process that occurs commonly in nature. The most common of these natural processes is inosculence which is the term that describes natural self grafting. This occurs most commonly on root systems where roots cross but have insufficient room to grow around each other. The active cambial layers fuse together so as to produce a natural grafted union.

A few years after I started working trees this way I became aware of others producing similar work and, through them, others that had gone before. It could be said that many of
these works share common design but these commonalities are the result of the limitations in the medium we work with; the living tree. No doubt these other practitioners of Arborsculpture have experienced the same joy in their success along with the sorrow of failure as I have. The failures we strive to avoid in the future but often come at the cost of lost years.

There is only one way to tie a reef knot and only a few techniques of plaiting. Not all plants are capable of self inosculence and even fewer capable of joining this way with another species of the same plant and less still another genus. Manual grafting can also be employed along with techniques to encourage inosculence. What is required most of all is patience.

Arborsculpture is not a pastime for those who want a result today, tomorrow or even next year! The nursery industry caters for the gardener’s impatience. We can all learn to propagate and nurture seeds and cuttings and grow whatever we desire but most people have not the time; easier to buy it, off the shelf, as an established plant when six months or a year or two old. Many people are prepared to pay a premium to have that semi-mature specimen to plant. That 3-4 meter high tree that might have taken four to ten years to grow brings you closer to the end result. That bonsai specimen that someone else has nurtured for 10, 20 or 30 years is a unique opportunity to buy back years of your life rather than say “if only I had time”

– Andrew Gregory
Partner & co-owner of North Central Farm Trees
Owner & Founder Wirehand Design