Ground to Crown – HF Research Fund

A fork, a bend or a branch can offer a useful starting point for a design. But whether it reaches a workshop often depends on decisions made in the forest, before anyone has a particular use in mind. Once a tree has been cut into standard lengths, many of those possibilities are gone.

With my colleague Maria Yablonina, I am working at Haliburton Forest to explore how we might recognise and preserve more of them. We use 3D scans of standing trees to look for useful pieces and plan where to cut. The aim is to recover forks, bends and branches alongside good conventional timber, in ways that can fit into the practical work of harvesting.

Our starting point is a single tree. We follow it from its standing form through felling, cutting, transport and drying, comparing the pieces we obtain with the shapes recorded in the scans. A digital model can suggest what might be available, but the physical work tells us what is possible: branches can break as a tree falls, pieces have to be manageable to move, and wood changes shape as it dries.

We are developing tools to help identify possible pieces and lay out cuts, while recording what happens to the wood along the way. How closely does a recovered fork match its earlier scan? How does its angle change as it dries? What information would someone need to design with it later?

The work builds on the Tree Fork Truss, where we selected trees for a particular structure. Here we are asking how unusual timber could become available as a material for many different designs. The hope is that a designer or maker could work with a collection of recorded pieces without having to organise the whole journey from the forest themselves.

We have called the project Ground to Crown, reusing the title of Patrick Birch’s MSc Design + Make dissertation. It is part of a wider enquiry running through my work and teaching: finding valuable purposes for more of a tree, with its existing qualities helping to inform what we make.

The images above show tree scanning, cutting plans, fieldwork and recovered pieces from the project. The research is ongoing.

With thanks to Adam Gorgolewski, Tegan Legge and the Haliburton Forest team. Photography by Chris Brown is included in the project presentation, alongside scans, diagrams and other project documentation.