Water transport in tall trees is an everyday phenomenon, seldom noticed and not completely understood even by scientists. As a topic of current research in plant physiology it has several advantages for presentation within school physics lectures: it is interdisciplinary and clearly shows the connection between physics and biology; the construction of an artificial tree is an ideal laboratory project, which enables detailed studies of several phenomena related to water transport in an artificial tree model; it also clearly shows the failures of widespread ideas about the origins of the upward water flow. We present the construction of the laboratory tree, suggest measurements that illustrate water transport and present a few additional experiments which clearly show why water transport in trees higher than 10 m is still an ongoing debate amongst plant physiologists. (Contains 8 figures.)