Tree House / Tree Forts and Trees. Treehouse.

Seeing that you landed on a treehouse page, you may like large trees as well. After reading here, check our page Redwoods > Grove of Titans & Lost Monarch / Atlas Grove & Iluvatar

If you have plans to build a tree house, on or in a tree, its wise to make a decision in advance about how important your tree is to you. As you can find in links at the bottom, other people have much more information about constructing Treehouses. This page is just a short reminder about building a tree house to protect ornamental tree, is tree preservation is desired.

If your tree's health is very important to you, that does not mean that you can't have a tree house in your tree. Maybe you could have two tree houses in your tree.

The health or development of your tree will depend on how you secure or position the treehouse within the canopy.

The trunks, leaders and limbs of trees, expand yearly, and there can be significant tissue damage to trees, when tree houses are attached without allowing room for the trunk and bark to expand outward. If the tree that you expect to use is nothing very special, it may work out fine for you to wedge a tree house against the trunk or within the limbs.

For entertainment, I included this image of the round tree house. The picture was taken at a place called It's a Burl - or Burl Gallery. Located in Kerby, Oregon, just a few minutes east of Cave Junction, Oregon. From a quick glance at the image, it looks like the trim for the window openings, is from the trunk of madrone or oak trees - openings in the trunk where limbs died, and the trunk tissue started to callus over the opening a little. One other other large tree house at a property I used to work at is in my Tree Care album.

If your tree is special, you may want to plan your project more carefully. It is available to place tree houses in trees but support the weight on posts. An entire tree house can be supported on posts, rather than anchoring lumber against bark that will expand with growth.

For your tree house project. your options are simple. Is the tree important, or not? Do you want to secure your tree houses to the tree, or use support posts instead? How long do you plan to keep the tree house? In general, the decisions are very easy.

About the only reason for hiring the service of an arborist, would be if you need to know a few things about your tree. Like what type of tree it is, and how fast the trunk and limbs will expand each year. An arborist can also help you detect areas of the trunk that either have decay and are weak, or that are candidates for decay.

Or, if you need to secure the tree house to your tree, what kind of fasteners and hardware can you use? Can you bolt into the tree? Could you put a cable through the tree to anchor or suspend the tree house?

An arborist may not be able to tell you that you should fasten a tree house with certain hardware, due to liability issues, but many arborists should be able to provide a personal opinion on how they would approach the project if it was their own tree and tree house project.

Oregon has a nice assortment of tree houses. There is even a tree house resort near Cave Junction in Southern Oregon. For starters, here is a main link to treehouses.com

Here are other links: Building Treehouses, Cedar Creek Treehouse at Mt. Rainier, Wikipedia Treehouse article, and treehouses.org. There are plenty of pages about treehouses on the internet - more than I expected. Many of the pages have tips, advice and photos. Its a hobby that many people seem to enjoy sharing about and helping other people with.