Ecopods meet Hobbit House - California

Ecopods are the collaborative creation between Ross Martin Design and renown tree house architect Roderick Wolgamott. They are ephemeral plant containers woven from grapevines spiraled around reclaimed tomato cages and other repurposed frames. Vines are culled from gardens as part of annual maintenance or harvested from forests smothered in tendrils. The pods contain live plants, like cranberries and weeping hemlocks. They serve as holiday or temporary decorative plantings and later entire containers are “planted” in the ground, perhaps in a community garden. Once buried, rotting wood sponges water and releases nutrients, little self-contained hugel mounds feeding the miniature ecosystems.

Hobbit house is inspired by ecopods only using willow wood instead. Artist William “Willow Bill” Goulardt sources branches in willow choked wetlands around the West Coast. Amongst his most well-known work are 85 miles of willow reindeer festooning a Nevada highway during the holidays. Hobbit house “Educational Active Playhouse” is an RMD and WB creation clustered amongst and around towering redwoods on a private Northern California estate. 

Shards and bolts of light stream and shaft through gaps and windows, flickering when the redwood bows dance in the wind. This child size wonderworld draws youthful eyes inward and upward encouraging intimacy with both forest floor and canopy at once. Little feet pad the duff, and hands caress the bark. A hidden fortress deep in the forest.

Unlike plastic and metal play structures, as with the ecopods, the entire house can be mulched back into the woodland soils once outgrown.