Forest garden - Definition

Forest gardening (also known as 3-Dimensional Gardening) is a food production and land management system based on replicating woodland edge ecosystems, substituting trees (such as fruit or nut trees), bushes, shrubs, herbs and vegetables which have yields directly useful to humankind.

In part based on the model of the Keralan 'home gardens', forest gardening has been pionered by the late Robert Hart, whose one eighth of an acre (500 m²) plot at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire has been described as possibly the only fully developed working permaculture site in the UK.

Robert began the project over thirty years ago with the intention of providing a healthy and therapuetic environment for himself and his brother Lacon, born with severe learning disabilities.

Starting as relatively conventional smallholders, Robert soon discovered that maintaining large annual vegetable beds, rearing livestock and taking care of an orchard were tasks beyond their strength. However, he also observed that a small bed of perennial vegetables and herbs they had planted up was looking after itself with little or no intervention. Furthermore, these plants provided interesting and unusual additions to the diet, as well as seeming to promote health and vigour in both body and mind.

Noting the maxim of Hippocrates to "make food your medicine and medicine your food", Robert adopted a vegan, 90% raw food diet. He also began to examine the interactions and relationships that take place between plants in natural systems, particularly in woodland, the climax ecosystem of a cool temperate region such as the British Isles. This led him to evolve the concept of the "Forest Garden": Based on the observation that the natural forest can be divided into distinct layers or "storeys", he developed an existing small orchard of apples and pears into an edible landscape consisting of seven dimensions;

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.

See also

agroecology