Forest gardening

Robert Hart's forest garden in Shropshire, England.

Forest gardening is an organic plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers, to replicate a woodland habitat. Forest gardening can be viewed as a way to recreate the Garden of Eden.

Origins and history

Forest gardens are thought to be the world's oldest and most resilient agroecosystem. They originated in prehistoric times along jungle-clad river banks and in the wet foothills of monsoon regions. In the gradual process of families improving their immediate environment, useful tree and vine species were identified, protected and improved whilst undesirable species were eliminated. Eventually superior foreign species were selected and incorporated into the gardens. Forest gardening is believed to be the oldest form of land use in the world.

Much of the Yucatán Maya food supply was grown in "orchard-gardens", known as pet kot. The system takes its name from the low wall of stones (pet meaning circular and kot wall of loose stones) that characteristically surrounds the gardens.

Forest gardens are still common in the tropics and known by various names such as: home gardens in Kerala in South India, Nepal, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania; Kandyan forest gardens in Sri Lanka; huertos familiares, the "family orchards" of Mexico; and pekarangan, the gardens of "complete design", in Java. Forest gardens have been shown to be a significant source of income and food security for local populations.

Robert Hart

Robert Hart adapted forest gardening for temperate zones during the early 1960s. Hart began farming at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire with the intention of providing a healthy and therapeutic environment for himself and his brother Lacon. Starting as relatively conventional smallholders, Hart soon discovered that maintaining large annual vegetable beds, rearing livestock and taking care of an orchard were tasks beyond their strength. However, a small bed of perennial vegetables and herbs he planted was looking after itself with little intervention.

Following Hart's adoption of a raw vegan diet for health and personal reasons, he replaced his farm animals with plants. The three main products from a forest garden are fruit, nuts and green leafy vegetables. He created a model forest garden from a 0.12 acre (500 m²) orchard on his farm and intended naming his gardening method ecological horticulture or ecocultivation. Hart later dropped these terms once he became aware that agroforestry and forest gardens were already being used to describe similar systems in other parts of the world. He was inspired by the forest farming methods of Toyohiko Kagawa and James Sholto Douglas, and the productivity of the Keralan home gardens as Hart explains:

From the agroforestry point of view, perhaps the world's most advanced country is the Indian state of Kerala, which boasts no fewer than three and a half million forest gardens…As an example of the extraordinary intensivity of cultivation of some forest gardens, one plot of only 0.12 hectare (0.3 acre) was found by a study group to have twenty-three young coconut palms, twelve cloves, fifty-six bananas, and forty-nine pineapples, with thirty pepper vines trained up its trees. In addition, the small holder grew fodder for his house-cow.

Seven-layer system

The seven layers of the forest garden.

Robert Hart pioneered a system based on the observation that the natural forest can be divided into distinct levels. He used intercropping to develop an existing small orchard of apples and pears into an edible polyculture landscape consisting of the following layers:

1. ‘Canopy layer’ consisting of the original mature fruit trees.
2. ‘Low-tree layer’ of smaller nut and fruit trees on dwarfing root stocks.
3. ‘Shrub layer’ of fruit bushes such as currants and berries.
4. ‘Herbaceous layer’ of perennial vegetables and herbs.
5. ‘Ground cover layer’ of edible plants that spread horizontally.
6. ‘Rhizosphere’ or ‘underground’ dimension of plants grown for their roots and tubers.
7. ‘Vertical layer’ of vines and climbers.

A key component of the seven-layer system was the plants he selected. Most of the traditional vegetable crops grown today, such as carrots, are sun loving plants not well selected for the more shady forest garden system. Hart favoured shade tolerant perennial vegetables.

Development

The Agroforestry Research Trust, managed by Martin Crawford, runs experimental forest gardening projects on a number of plots in Devon, United Kingdom.

Forest gardening has been adopted as a common permaculture design element. Bill Mollison, who coined the term permaculture, visited Robert Hart at his forest garden in Wenlock Edge in October 1990. Numerous permaculturists are proponents of forest gardens, or food forests, such as Patrick Whitefield, Dave Jacke, Eric Toensmeier and Geoff Lawton. Whitefield wrote the book How to Make a Forest Garden in 2002, Jacke and Toensmeier co-authored the two volume book set Edible Forest Gardening in 2005, and Lawton presented the film Establishing a Food Forest in 2008.

Ken Fern had the idea that for a successful temperate forest garden a wider range of edible shade tolerant plants would need to be used. To this end, Fern created the organisation Plants for a Future (PFAF) which compiled a plant database suitable for such a system. Fern used the term woodland gardening, rather than forest gardening, in his book Plants for a Future.

The Movement for Compassionate Living (MCL) promote forest gardening and other types of vegan organic gardening to meet society's needs for food and natural resources. Kathleen Jannaway, the founder of MCL, wrote a book outlining a sustainable vegan future called Abundant Living in the Coming Age of the Tree in 1991. In 2009, the MCL provided a grant of £1,000 to the Bangor Forest Garden project in Gwynedd, North West Wales.

Projects

El Pilar on the Belize-Guatemala border features a forest garden to demonstrate traditional Maya agricultural practices. A further 1-acre model forest garden, called Känan K’aax (meaning well-tended garden in Mayan), is being funded by the National Geographic Society and developed at Santa Familia Primary School in Cayo.

Forest gardens are to be found in various research trials such as those at the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute, community farms and gardens like Montview Neighborhood farm, and in small yards throughout the temperate world.

In Canada food forester Richard Walker has been developing and maintaining food forests in the province of British Columbia for over 30 years. He developed a 3-acre food forest that when at maturity provided raw materials for a nursery and herbalism business as well as food for his family.

See also

• Agroecology
• Analog forestry
• Deep ecology
• List of companion plants
• Movement for Compassionate Living
• Mycoforestry
• Multiple cropping
• Natural farming
• Perennial vegetable
• Polyculture
• Urban agriculture
• Vegan organic gardening

Further reading

• Crawford, Martin. Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops. Totnes: Green Books, 2010. ISBN 1900322625
• Douglas, J. Sholto and Hart, Robert A. de J. Forest Farming. Intermediate Technology, 1985. ISBN 0946688303
• Fern, Ken. Plants for a Future: Edible and Useful Plants for a Healthier World. Hampshire: Permanent Publications, 1997. ISBN 1856230112.
• Hart, Robert A. de J. Forest Gardening: Cultivating an Edible Landscape. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1996. ISBN 0930031849.
• Hart, Robert A. de J. Beyond the Forest Garden. Gaia Books, 1996. ISBN 185675037X.
• Jacke, Dave, and Toensmeier, Eric. Edible Forest Gardens. Two volume set. Volume One: Ecological Vision and Theory for Temperate Climate Permaculture, ISBN 1931498792. Volume Two: Ecological Design and Practice for Temperate Climate Permaculture, ISBN 1931498806. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2005.
• Jannaway, Kathleen. Abundant Living in the Coming Age of the Tree. Movement for Compassionate Living, 1991. ISBN 0951732803.
• Smith, Joseph Russell Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. Island Press, 1988 (first published in 1929). ISBN 0933280440
• Whitefield, P. How to Make a Forest Garden. Hampshire: Permanent Publications, 2002. ISBN 1856230082.

External links

• Why Food Forests?, Permaculture Research Institute
• Plant an Edible Forest Garden, Mother Earth News
• The garden of the future?, The Guardian
• Edible Forest Gardens: an Invitation to Adventure, The Natural Farmer
• Forest gardens, Permaculture Association
• El Pilar Forest Garden Network, information on traditional Maya forest gardening