Big Trees - Fake Landscapes

big trees

indoor

‘Big trees’ isn’t a massively good description, but ‘trees 3m and above’ is pretty dull as well. Three metres - ten feet in old money - is where we have an arbitrary height division in our range. It’s about the limit of what can be fitted into rooms with normal ceiling heights, unless you’re after the sumo-wrestler-trapped-in-a-broom-cupboard look.

We hand-build nearly all our larger trees to suit the room and practical considerations, like the need to seat people underneath them, or to have the lowest leaves out of reach. We can also make them wonky (surely ‘asymmetrical’? Ed.) to suit. There are always issues with shipping and getting them into a building, but over the years we’ve developed some neat solutions of the ‘ship in a bottle’ type.

Any custom tree takes a few weeks to build, but we do appreciate that some projects get brought forward, and/or a live tree has suddenly given up the ghost. That’s why we carry two types of 3m trees in stock, the olive and the ficus alii, and can get those to you as soon as we have a gap in our installation schedule.

If you’re after something smaller, have a look at house trees or our handbuilt range.

big trees

indoor

664 fake landscapes 2900mm giant olive in clients planter

665 fake landscapes 4m tall cheefully wonky tree Gothenburg 1080DEF

667 fake landscapes bamboos 10m vodafone hq

669 fake landscapes hybrid 5m tree Annabels

670 fake landscapes 5m twin head long trunk gingko prototype

671 Fake Landscapes 3m giant ficus benjamina

675 fake landscapes liana 4m FR cam for el Pastor production sample

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Our classic Olive tree – available from stock, and nominally 3m tall, although with careful tweaking it can be condensed to about 2.7m, and, with the right pot, raised up to about 3.3m. The silver-grey leaves means it can fit into pretty much any scheme, and although we’ve had them for years, they’ve only become really popular in the last four or five. It’s also UV resistant, so great for courtyards and patios. 664

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Here’s one of our ‘proper’ handbuilt camellias, well over 4m tall and about the same across. Designed to fit into a corner with the branches coming out across the room. It’s made with a preserved natural trunk, inherently flame retardant foliage, and was shipped in bits to where you see it, a gelateria in Gothenburg, Sweden - and then re-assembled. Back öf the net! 665

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We don’t do that many big palm projects in the UK, possibly to do with the climate… That being said, these big boys are in a shopping centre (remember them?) in the Midlands. There is a reason, the company that owned it were based a fair way south of that in Malaga. It must have made perfect sense from down there! 666

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Giant bamboos, the best way to get tremendous height without the canopy filling up the whole atrium, as here, at Vodafone. These are around 11m tall and we assembled them like the gun Edward Fox has made for him in The Day of the Jackal, more or less… 667

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Nice picture of the vacuum cleaner! Also Callum (hi Callum, how’s Perth?!). He’s about 2m tall, so this is a set of our 4-5m tall ‘umbrella’ camellia trees with multiple trunks. It’s one of our favourite large hand-built trees, very cool looking. These are in some funky handmade planters in the marquee at the Hurley House Hotel in Berkshire, which is a lovely place. 668

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This a hybrid tree, based on a live one at about 5m tall that was in shock and losing its leaves, just as Annabel’s was set to open. We fitted the lower half and parts of the canopy with our branches, and colour matched the existing leaves so it would look good while it recovered. 669

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A magnificent oddity, we’d intended this Gingko with staggered canopies to fit into the 6m tall-but-narrow bit at the back of the showroom. Someone saw it in production and bought it, and by the time we’d got round to making another one, we’d filled that tall part with hanging plants! 670

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An old classic, a ficus benjamina at around three and a half metres tall with a nice liana trunk. In a funky Moroccan pool, as well! They’ve fallen out of fashion currently, but everything comes round in cycles and it’s still a good looking tree. 671

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This is a prototype 5m ficus longifolia we built for an architect’s practice, as an option to replace the (struggling) live ones in a well-known technology company’s showrooms. Their name escapes our mind, it’s a fruit of some sort… 672

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The second of our off-the-shelf big trees, this is a 3m ficus alii (it would also pass as a longifolia or a mango) and must have been freshly assembled when the picture was taken, as it’s got a terrible case of ‘bed hair’! Fake leaves need to be tweaked to make the shape as natural as possible, and we’re not beyond using hot air blowers to get it perfect as well. 673

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Yes, that’s an enormously tall Washingtonia palm in the lobby at a project at Al-Khobar. It’s nine metres tall – and the bloke isn’t deliberately in there for scale, he was just passing - hence the suspicious look on his face. Does the job, though! 674

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We don’t show many workshop pictures, preferring ones in the final location. This was a really pretty 4m camellia that ended up in a bar-restaurant in the hip part of King’s Cross (isn’t it all nowadays?!) and got lost among the aluminium ventilation tubes and hanging giant lightbulbs… 675