A couple has spent nearly two decades growing furniture from living trees, creating what they call Britain’s first “furniture orchard”.

Alice and Gavin Munro shape young trees over frames, with each chair taking up to nine years to form before being dried and finished. Their bespoke pieces have been sold as functional art for up to £75,000 ($100,000). The pair now plan to share their techniques to help others grow their own designs.

"We're growing trees upside down for six to 10 years and then every now and then we get to harvest them," said Gavin Munro in a video. "This one's been cut down a little bit early, but you can see the direction we're going in. The first seed was sewn when I was a young boy."

Munro said he got this idea early in life. "My parents had bonsai trees and there was a moment in the winter like looking up at them on the shelf and one of them had overgrown and looked like a throne. It was one of those little images that sticks in your head."

He began working with Chris Cattle, a British furniture designer who has developed a process of growing stools by shaping living trees, and they had the idea to create a "chair orchard." Why don't we shape and graft and bend the things as they grow, graft them together like you see here, and then you've got this like one solid piece. We're two decades in, as you can imagine. It's a very long learning cycle with the tree."