When I was a kid, my friends and I used to play house in the woods. We would make our homes out of an area surrounded by trees, the closer together the better. Sometimes we found nice green moss for carpet. One warm early spring day before the leaves came out, we found a great place with vines that made real nice walls. Too bad the vines turned out to be poison ivy.
These
MIT guys got a lot of press recently for his idea of building a house from growing trees. This process of training trees to grow together with other trees is called pleaching and would be fun to experiment with, although at my age time is of the essence. Maybe it would work with
bamboo; they mature in five years.
Here's an interesting article about how in medieval times they built huts into pleached trees to keep them off of frequently flooded ground.
P.J. Wilkin has quite a thorough article on how to go about
Growing Home complete with suggested planting plans. And then of course you could grow your own furniture while you're at it like
Arborsmith Studios.
