Branching out: living in the trees

Whole Earth, Summer, 2002 by Suki Casanave

The notion of building shelters in treetops is not new. Old engravings depict treetop dwellers in the South Pacific living in thatched nests, riding up and down in baskets. In New Guinea tree houses offered protection from enemy attack. Even today, some inhabitants of Irian Jaya, in the western part of New Guinea, live high above the forest floor in houses built of palm fronds.

But throughout history, tree houses have been inspired by more than necessity. People have long been inclined to build them simply because they are so much fun. Anthony Huxley's Illustrated History of Gardening notes that the Romans seem to have gone in for tree seats, and that, from the Middle Ages on, tree arbors were popular. One famous specimen, built into a giant lime tree in England, rose for three stories-leafy rooms of bent branches one on top of the other, "the goodliest spectacle mine eyes ever beheld for one tree to carry," wrote John Parkinson in his Paradisi in Sole of 1629. Parkinson also marveled at the second floor, "wherein might bee placed halle a hundred men at the least.... "Apparently this tree house attracted royal attention. It is thought that Queen Elizabeth I herself once stopped for dinner in the second-floor banquet hall, joined perhaps by "halfe a hundred men."

During the Italian Renaissance, the Medicis seem to have been driven by a sort of architectural family rivalry to see who could pack the most marble into a tree. One of their extravaganzas included a marble table, seats and fountains, and two marble stairways that spiraled up on opposite sides of the tree. This marvel was depicted in a seventeenth-century engraving by Stephano della Bella. In his travel writings of 1580, Montaigne recorded his visit to a Medici tree house.

In England, a half-timber cottage originally built in the late seventeenth century on the grounds of Pitchford Hall in Shropshire is still perched in the garden lime tree. A 13-year-old princess who grew up to be Queen Victoria visited this one-room Tudor tree house on October 28, 1832, noting the occasion in her journal: "At a little past one we came home and walked about the grounds, and I went up a staircase to a little house in a tree."

In France a chestnut-lined street in a town just west of Paris became known in the mid-nineteenth century for its arboreal restaurants. While musicians and dancers made merry on the ground, diners climbed into small gazebo-style dining rooms among the branches and were served elaborate meals, hauled up by means of ropes and pulleys. Advertising their "Magnifique point de rue," those restaurants flourished for more than a century.

Two historic French tree houses still stand. Tiny twin chapels in the trunk of a venerable oak in Normandy have survived lightning, as well as the wrath of revolutionaries. In daily use for more than 300 years, the landmark rises from the churchyard in Allouville-Bellefosse. Though it's lost many branches, the tree lives on, a topped with a cross.

Early in this century the American novelist Mary Austin secured her reputation as an eccentric when she constructed a rustic tree house among the gnarled pines in Carmel, California. Austin was visited in her "wick-i-up," as she called it, by friends and fellow writers Robinson Jeffers and Jack London. A yellowed photograph in the Carmel library archives depicts Austin in her open-air writing room, pen in hand, pine tree at her back. She spent mornings there, according to local lore, reviewing proofs of her work.

Some of history's most memorable tree houses exist only in the imagination. Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch's "Tree-man" from his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights depicts a sort of surreal tree-house-from-hell peopled with strange half-human creatures. In A. A. Milne's Hundred Acre Wood, Owl's tree house, which boasts both a knocker and a bellpull, is the site of frequent visits from Pooh and other forest friends. Nowadays many newspaper readers across the country keep tabs on the treetop world of Shoe, a comic strip character created by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Jeff MacNelly.

The most famous tree house of all time, designed by writer Johann David Wyss, was home to the Swiss Family Robinson. Literature's shipwrecked clan lives happily ever after at Falconhurst, high in a mangrove tree. The Disneyland version of this treetop address is perched in a 150-ton Disneydendron semperflorens grandis in Anaheim, California. The "everblooming Disney tree" is constructed of no cubic yards of concrete and six tons of reinforced steel. In keeping with the novel, a water wheel at the base of the tree sends water to the rooms overhead, carrying more than 200 gallons per hour in bamboo buckets.

For geologists Judy and Campbell Bridges, who have conventional homes in Nairobi and Virginia, it was the marching, munching ants that inspired their tree house. "It took them more than an hour to pass our tent," says Judy, recalling a night in the wilds of Kenya surrounded by marauding siafu. The stinging ants are known to eat everything in their path. "You could hear them the whole time," she says. "Suddenly a tree house seemed like a really good idea."