Creating rustic garden structures

I've been visiting with my brother Ted. One of the great things about relatives is that you can reminisce about tree forts of yore. I remember our forts as great monuments to design but my brother mostly remembers them as medical incidents. (This is the brother who spent his youth in the emergency room after such episodes as inhaling bacon, swallowing a whistle, fixing his bike with an axe, and getting foot spray in his eyes.)

I couldn't talk my brother into building a fort, but he did agree to the idea of constructing a rustic arbour out of recently pruned tree branches. Now in the old days, we couldn't work together. We'd get into an argument and end up pounding each other out. So I was a little nervous.

Sure enough, after five minutes of trying to agree on an arbour design it was obvious that there were ideological rifts in our partnership, plus he's a foot taller than me now so the option of pounding him out wasn't as attractive as when he was a fat short kid. With the wisdom of maturity I suggested we build separate projects.

There followed an afternoon of steady industry concluding with something no one expected - zero trips to the hospital. I left my brother alone (except to check for severed body parts). He completed a trellis made from sinuous maple branches in less than an hour. I saw him walk by with the completed project but I pretended not to notice him. Because I was in trouble.

The ladder-shaped sides of my arbour were looking - what's that word that describes avant-garde freeform architecture? Oh, I know - Bad.

I was going for rustic but I was getting a mix of raucous and caustic. I'd chosen rigid deadwood for the frame of my arbour but it wasn't going well. The 7-foot ladder-shaped structures that would form the sides of the arbour were as wonky as the way my brother walked that time he crashed into the stop sign on his bike and his banana seat went farther north than he did.

But I knew two things; I wasn't going to be outdone by my brother, and I wasn't going to get any beer until I'd built something useful.

Here are 10 steps to getting your brother to give you beer.

1. Collect a pile of branches. Any trimmings work. Maple and lilac are some of the most durable. Deadwood is fine if that's all you've got; it means building a more geometric structure because deadwood won't do loopy arches the way green wood will.
2. Lay the design out on the driveway or lawn. An arbour is two vertical ladders (mine were 7 feet tall) with horizontal branches (or another ladder) across the top.
3. For a trellis, use non-corrosive wire to bind green branches into the shape you want. If your branches are more than a half-inch thick, use rust-resistant screws to fasten them. Drill pilot holes for the screws.
4. You can work faster with two drills, one loaded with a drill bit, the other with a driver bit.
5. Resist the urge to strip foliage and shoots off the branches. Little sprigs add detail to the finished project so it doesn't look barren while vines or ivy take time to grow on it.
6. If you're putting an arbour around a chain-link gate like I did, anchor it by threading the side crosspieces through the chain link as you build it in place. Rest the four corner posts on flat rocks to prevent rot.
7. Add short diagonal branches at the top corners, bracing the arbour against racking and collapsing in the wind.
8. For a freestanding arbour, drive three-foot stakes into the ground and screw the corner posts to the stakes.
9. Use bud-covered green branches to make the top of the arch look fulsome.
10. Weave green branches up the sides to soften the starkness of the 'ladders'.

Tools and Materials

• Power drill and bits
• Hand saw or pruning saw
• Secateurs or pruning shears
• Twigs and branches, fresh or dead
• Non-corrosive wire (copper or aluminium)
• Rust-resistant screws of various lengths

Even if you've never built anything in your life, you can build with twigs. And if you do it at a relative's house, you'll walk away knowing you've given them something that will always remind them of you. Until it falls down. And that'll remind them of you too.