Who needs flat-pack furniture when you can grow your own!

COUPLE'S CREATIONS TAKE 6-9 YEARS TO BE READY BUT CAN BE WORTH £75,000

- By ADAM DUTTON

Gavin and Alice Munro with some of the chairs they are growing at their furniture farm in Wirksworth

AN eco-minded Derbyshire couple are taking sustainability to the next level running Britain's first ‘furniture orchard’ - where chairs are grown on trees.

Alice and Gavin Munro started harvesting their bespoke chairs on a two-acre Derbyshire farm back in 2006. The pair have spent the next 20 years perfecting the practice of sculpting living trees to grow upside-down into the shapes of intricate ready-made seats.

The process typically takes up to nine years per chair and involves pruning young tree branches as they grow over a special metal frame to form the shape.

Branches are then sliced and their bark brought together so that the shape can grow as one solid form.

Each item is dried for a year after being chopped before and they have been sold both to customers and more recently as artworks valued at £75,000.

The couple, of Wirksworth, are now planning to launch a programme in the near future to help people grow their own chairs. They have also used the same technique to craft benches, lamps and tables.

Gavin, 51, who runs the business called Full Grown, said: “We're 20 years into what might be a 50 or 100-year journey. We started out by trying to think what is the most subtle interaction we can have with the world in order to create useful, beautiful objects. We wanted to collaborate with nature.

“You're basically taking a piece of bark from one branch and bringing them together, so they grow together.