The Chair Farmer

April 21, 2026 · 24 min · Season 4 · Episode 6

About this episode

Gavin Munro discusses his unique approach to growing trees shaped into chairs in his orchard.

Gavin Munro describes himself as a chair farmer. In his orchard he grows trees and meticulously shapes them into chairs. As the trees grow, their branches are carefully trained, pruned and grafted, gently guided to form a back, seat and four legs. Fullgrown is the project and passion of Gavin and his wife Alice and he takes us on a tour of the orchard and explains how not every tree wants to be a chair. One of their chairs will be part of the Plant Heritage Missing Collector garden at this year's prestigious RHS Chelsea Flower show. Who will sit on it? Do get all NEW episodes of this podcast in your inbox signup for the newsletter on the Our Plant Stories website. You can support this independent podcast through Buy Me a Coffee . Our Plant Stories is presented and produced by Sally Flatman The music is Fade to Black by Howard Levy This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: OP3 - https://op3.dev/privacy

People in this episode

Host: Sally Flatman

Guest: Gavin Munro

Topics covered

furniture design
sustainable agriculture
art in nature
gardening
innovation

Keywords

chair farming
tree shaping
sustainable design
orchard tour
RHS Chelsea Flower show

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Plant Heritage, RHS Chelsea Flower show

Books & works: Fade to Black