apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

My parent's cottage in Ontario's Haliburton cottage country has a deck like this. It seems like a pretty common thing, actually. I don't think you need to be a hard core environmentalist for it to be clear that tearing down a tree for the benefit of extending a deck out by a couple feet isn't the right thing to do. (Especially since most people who have homes with trees like that own those homes at least partly because the love the trees.)

A word of warning though: the tree in parent's deck has had a good 15 years of growth since the deck was built, and it's girth is outgrowing the hole. The hole needs to be noticed and widened before it starts interfering with the growth of the tree.

We had a deck like this when I was a kid! :)

Me too! I always loved it. It was an oak though, and we hung one of those net-chairs from it. It felt like you were sitting in a hammock!

I just had a pine tree like that fall on my roof, so truth be told I'm slightly less in love with my trees now than I was when we bought the place.

We have this at our Catskills place (already featured on AT):
http://flickr.com/photos/marstin/622294662/in/set-72157600003310441/

We love it--except when, like Rebecca_South, a huge branch fell on the roof and we had to pay someone $600 to trim the tree and make sure the whole thing wasn't going to topple...

My husband and I got married between the two trees in my brother's deck, which made for some great symbolism *and* some great pictures.

Agree with other posters that this doesn't reflect some kind of hardcore tree-hugging .... nor is it some new "green" revelation. Thinking back to my very 'burbsy, very bourgeois youth, this was pretty much standard. If you wanted a deck where a tree already was, you left the tree there -- not to save the planet, but because it's prettier, shadier, and it's a heck of a lot cheaper to shorten your deck boarding than to take down a tree. While Kyle's parents may well have made this design choice for green reasons, sometimes I wonder if we urbanites don't pat ourselves on the back a bit too often for "discovering" "new" solutions that have been standard operating procedure for decades in less hip demographics.

Yes, what ljbmonkey said.

Agreed that your urban bias is showing. There is nothing new on necessarily green about doing this. It is an old and time honored way of building decks, especially in cottage country. And is suspect if you look around a bit, you will find that a lot more people than you think do it, even in the city...

What is hardcore tree-hugging, is when an entire house is built around a tree. http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2123/2049642338_cf129cdac6.jpg?v=0

My deck was built around an enormous (several feet in diameter) tree and I had to cut it down last year as it was starting to become a hazard to the house. I cried.

The family lodge/resort place my family went to every year for vacation had a full tree growing through the dining room and out the middle of the roof. When the owners expanded the dining room in the 60s, they just built around the tree because it was so big. It even had a tiny stream of water at the base of it, which sometimes attracted frogs from outside. Really bizarre, considering the otherwise formal dining room.

And I agree with ljbmonkey, too. Decks around trees were a pretty common sight in my average suburban childhood.

This is very common here where I live. But more so building around more stable trees. Have you ever seen a pine tree in a strong wind? That tree is going to sway, and quite a LOT, and potentially do some significant damage to the deck. I'm an advocate of building around trees like oaks, but never a pine. Something else common here is building the actual roof of the house around the tree, with an indentation in the overhang. I'm not a fan of this, though, because of the aforementioned swaying and resultant damage potential.