For 30 years, forest gardens have been planted in cities, gardens and parks in temperate climates around the world. Tomas Remiarz explores how this maturing, self-reproducing system is designed for abundance
Forest gardens are spaces where trees, shrubs, herbs, vegetables and flowers grow together in mixed patches, and in many layers.
An agroecologist might call them a multi-storey cropping system. To me, they are unique spaces in which humans meet nature halfway, and where both feed off one another.It is both an ancient, and a very new idea. In many tropical parts of the world, they have existed as home gardens since time immemorial. In the colder parts of the Northern hemisphere, they took off after Robert Hart returned from his travels in Kerala, southern India, harbouring dreams of edible forests.
In the three decades following Hart’s discovery, hundreds of experimental forest gardens have been planted all over the world. They can be found in cities and rural sites; in households and neighbourhoods; in community gardens and parks; and in market gardens and plant nurseries.
So how do you make a forest gardener? Forest gardens are complex. There is no way around that. In fact, this partly explains why we set them up in the first place, eager to find a space more natural and wild than a wheat field or pine plantation.
To deal with this complexity, the competent forest gardener needs a diverse toolkit, each tool drawing upon four domains of understanding.
Forest gardening is multidisciplinary; borrowing skills from ecology, horticulture, design, and communication alike.Like the sound of people-powered media?
As any good gardener will understand, gardening is a lot more than bending plants to our will. Working with living communities means giving them what they need, in the hope they will return the favour. In fact, gardening is always an act of hope. It requires patience, and asking from the land as well as giving to it. It challenges us to shape the natural processes around us, while respecting their own space.
Based on an understanding of natural patterns, permaculture is a design approach that particularly chimes with forest gardening, and many of the best forest…
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