The man, whose riddle of green sculptures even professional gardeners and botanists have not yet been able to solve, was self-taught, and made all the discoveries by observing how simple beans grow.
Surely many of you have seen wonderful figures from masterly trimmed trees and bushes. The art of park sculpture goes back several centuries. Skillful gardeners have learned how to shape green material into almost any shape by pruning branches and shaping the crown. However, in 1884, an amazing person was born - Axel Elradson, who managed to transform not only the branches and crown, but also the tree trunk itself as if it were pliable clay.
The family of this talented self-taught gardener emigrated to the United States from Sweden and settled in California in 1902. Since childhood, the boy disappeared in the fields, watching the growth of plants, trying to unravel the secrets of wildlife and learn its magic. And when he grew up, he founded his own farm and started growing legumes.
Fertile lands and natural flair - he seemed to be talking to plants - brought excellent harvests. The family business went uphill. To entertain himself and his loved ones, Axel decided to experiment with the trees of his own garden, turning it into a kind of fabulous gallery.
The difference between the innovator's living sculptures and classic park sculpture was that Elradson mainly worked with the trunk and branches, achieving amazing results. Tree-gazebo, tree-ladder, tree-man, tree-chair! The talented gardener has learned to create a wide variety of shapes. When he was asked what the secret was, why others could not repeat this, and how in his hands a living tree turns into pliable wax or clay, he answered: “I just ask them about it”.
And yet, they said, the farmer has the secret of a wonderful composition, thanks to which any cuts and joints of trunks and branches can be spliced. Experimenting with grafting, pruning, using designs of his own invention, he enthusiastically fiddled in the garden from morning to evening and did not count on any popularity at all.
But people are greedy for curiosities, and rumors spread quickly in the countryside. His garden, unexpectedly for the owner, turned into a local landmark: people from all over the area came to gaze at the outlandish sculpture trees. Deciding not to resist the unexpectedly fallen on him
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fame, Axel Elradson acquired a plot in the town of Scotts Valley at the intersection of several busy roads, transplanted his best specimens there and in 1947 inaugurated the Tree Circus Garden Museum.
After Axel's death in 1964, for a long time his work had practically no successors. But in 1996 his compatriots Peter Cook and Becky Nortey, inspired by Elradson's legacy, got the idea to grow living furniture and called their art pooktre - the art of manipulating the shape of growing trees.
And although, for example, the cultivation of one chair takes 15 years, they have plenty of orders. Even the Japanese bonsaists, and their demanding taste is extremely difficult to please, recognized the unusual skill of Peter and Becky. However, they themselves say that they are still far from what Elradson did.
Sergey Panasyan
