FOREST GARDENING FOREST GARDENING Rediscovering Nature & Community in a Post-Industrial Age ROBERT A de J HART Revised & updated edition This revised edition first published in 1996 by Green Earth Books, an imprint of Green Books, Foxhole, Dartington Totnes, Devon, TQ9 6EB Reprinted 2001 with a revised Foreword Reprinted 2009 (without colour plates) First published in ebook formats 2010 © 1991-2010 the estate of Robert A. de J. Hart All rights reserved British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available on request Print format ISBN 978 1 900322 02 7 PDF format ISBN 978 1 907448 36 2 ePub format ISBN 978 1 907448 37 9 CONTENTS Foreword by Herbert Girardet ix Prologue: The Mini-forest 1 1 Towards a Forest Economy 5 2Unity and Diversity 11 3Health & Wholeness 19 4 Personal Pilgrimage 31 5The Wenlock Edge Project 45 6Plant Life: Its Infinite Potentialities 61 7 Design & Maintenance 71 8 Water and No Water 81 9 Stored up Sunshine: Energy Yesterday and Tomorrow 91 10 The Thinking Hand: Skills of the Craftsman 101 11 Agroforestry Against World Want 115 12 Green is Real131 13Where Do We Go From Here? 143 Epilogue: A New Twist in the Evolutionary Spiral155 Appendix 1 Recommended Species: Temperate 159 Appendix 2 Recommended Species: Tropical and Sub-tropical 182 References 200 Suggested further reading 200 Recommended suppliers in the UK 202 Membership organisations 203 Index 205 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author and publishers would like to thank Amy Elvey and Susan Trill for their line drawings that appear throughout the book; the International Institute for Environment & Development for their kind permission to use three illustrations of forest gardens in Africa (from Paul Harrison’s The Greening of Africa).And finally, special thanks are due to Frans Wesselman for his generosity in donating the striking cover picture. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1 Japanese bridge leading to alder carr 32 Fig. 2 Swallowtail butterfly33 Fig. 3 The mattock, an ancient multi-purpose tool 37 Fig. 4 Plan of the author’s garden 44 Fig. 5 Fan-trained plum tree with blackcurrant bush47 Fig. 6 Circle-dancing round the oak tree 50 Fig. 7 Cross-section of temperate forest garden, showing seven ‘storeys’ 51 Fig. 8 An artist’s impression of the forest garden 52 Fig. 9 Rose-mound showing construction layers 53 Fig. 10 Bouché-Thomas hedge 54 Fig. 11 The Packhorse Trail 55 Fig. 12 Arch of Gaia56 Fig. 13 ‘Family’ apple tree 65 Fig. 14 George Cave apple tree with scaffolding to support branches borne down by abundant crop 67 Fig. 15 Oyster mushroom on logs 68 Fig. 16 Hedgehog as seen in sanctuary 72 Fig. 17 Treehouse 75 Fig. 18 Early Celtic Christian settlement 81 Fig. 19 Water-wheel for irrigating bog-garden 85 Fig. 20 Rutland Windcharger 97 Fig. 21 Basket-making 103 Fig. 22 Chagga forest garden 119 Fig. 23 Profile of tropical rainforest showing storeys 121 Fig. 24 Mangrove tree 122 Fig. 25 Alley-cropping 123 vii To ELENA who loves the Forest Garden FOREWORD en years ago the first edition of Forest Gardening came out, and it has Tattracted a large readership. That is because it is a book of hope; but even more than that, it is a book of practical instructions for a sustainable future of our own making. Sadly Robert Hart died in 2000, and can no longer enrich our lives with new inspiration. Forest Gardening remains perhaps his greatest and most enduring legacy and I am delighted that Green Books is continuing to keep the book in print. Robert wanted one thing more than anything else: he wanted us to grow forests – food forests. We can plant them all around us – in our commu- nities, on urban wasteland and in our own backyards. By showing us how, he has touched a deep need in many of us, in an age in which the only cer- tainty is change, and thus insecurity. Trees don’t race down motorways: they stand still. They are always there in the same place, and the only changes they undergo are those of the seasons, steadily, year after year. Robert Hart was a rare person. A man utterly convinced of a cause, an imaginative experimenter eloquent in expressing his message and with a stamina second to none. For decades he waged a lonely battle for life, patiently writing books and articles and quietly planting trees on his small farm in Shropshire. Robert created a forest garden which had a profound influence on the way we cultivate our patches of land. It was a garden dedicated to human needs for fruit, nuts, vegetables and plant medicines. But it was at the same time a celebration of the myriad interactions of life; for it was based on profound observations, both intuitive and scientific, of how different life forms interact in order to stimulate and support one another. His forest garden was, at the same time, a revolutionary new creation and a rediscovery of ancient plant knowledge. ix FOREST GARDENING For well over twenty years Robert taught the message of the goodness of life. If only we rediscovered the patient art of cultivation we would have little need for the excesses of modern technology. For him life starts and ends with trees. The Earth was once covered with forests. We have stripped away much of its living skin. Today we need to put trees back, allowing them again to root in the living Earth. But there are many peo- ple now and we need to plant forests to support our numbers. We need to practice forestry, as well as forest farming or, as this book so eloquently shows, small scale forest gardening. I have shared Robert’s interests for many years. In my travels as a writer and film-maker I have gone out of my way to find forest gardeners, in the tropics and the subtropics and in the temperate regions. Like Robert I have become convinced that cultivating trees is a great art, not of survival, but of living. Nature offered our ancestors an abundance of fruit and nut trees. The people before us – hunter gatherers, forest farmers and orchard cultivators all over the world – used the great imagination and creativity inherent in human nature to select and breed a huge variety of tree crops suitable for most of the climatic conditions on Earth. The pygmies in Africa, the Amerindians and the forest people of Asia rose to the challenge of life in the botanically most diverse regions on Earth by naming, select- ing and cultivating a most astonishing variety of food trees, which they improved through deliberate breeding. The forest gardens, or agro- forestry systems, in many parts of the tropics are a tribute to their patient art of cultivation. They support some of the highest population densities on Earth and they do so sustainably, both in terms of maintaining soil fer- tility as well as acceptable climatic conditions. For in hot climates wher- ever tree cover is maintained the soil is shaded and the temperatures remain moderate. The typical temperature in a mature tropical forest averages around 26˚C, but when the forest is removed for cattle ranching, or annual crops, average daytime temperature rises by some 10˚C. Forest gardens are not pristine environments – they are forests modi- fied to suit human needs. But tree gardens, too, are shady, moist and tem- perate, not quite as cool as the original rainforest, but temperate never- theless. The great multi-storey food forests of the Chagga on the slopes of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, for instance, are wonderfully cool but the plains below, now devoid of trees, swelter with heat. The Chagga gardens also happen to support the greatest population densities anywhere in East Africa. In the Amazon I have visited several different types of forest gar- dens. Some, like the tree farms of the caboclos in the flood plains of the river near Belem, have been sustained for centuries. Others have been established quite recently on abandoned cattle ranches by patient farmers, x FOREWORD advised and supported by sympathetic agronomists. There is no doubt in my mind that techniques are available for establishing sustainable forest farming systems on the wastelands of the Amazon even on relatively poor soils. Nature has extraordinary powers of recovery in the face of devas- tation, but people involved in environmental restoration have to have a profound understanding of the complex interactions that take place in the natural world. Robert Hart was a man who set out with a determination to help turn wasteland into paradise again. His patient work on his patch of land in Shropshire has led the way for inventing forest farming systems suitable for temperate climatic conditions. Our cool weather does not give us nearly the same range of tree crops that are suitable even for the Mediterranean. But, as Robert shows, we do have the choice of a far greater range of perennial crops than we are presently aware of. And if plant breeders took up the challenge of working on greater varieties of edible fruits and nuts, within a decade these would make their appearance in our gardens. Robert grew crops from all over the world without any discrimination as to their origins. America, China, Persia, Russia and western Europe can supply crops suitable for temperate climatic conditions. This ‘botanical internationalism’ transcends the rather limited range of species available here as a result of the genetic extinctions caused by our last ice age. But in the tropics, too, African forest farmers are happy to use South American crops and vice versa. Inventiveness has always been a trait of pioneering farmers.