The Era of Edible Forest Gardening has Arrived

(Edible Forest Garden at Lillie House, filled with food, flowers and medicinal and culinary herbs.)

Nature is calling us home, and people all over the world feel it, the urge to reconnect with their landscapes in a more meaningful way than the endless struggle against lawn and weeds. And the forest garden - a designed ecosystem filled with ripe fruits, lush vegetables, craft materials and medicine that integrates native plants and wildlife habitat - is the ideal representation of our rightful human relationship with the world, cultivating the wild, working with ecosystems to meet our needs instead of reaping them for profit or spraying them with poisons: nurturing all the beings around us while rewarding ourselves and our families.

Building on the improvements of the "native plants movement," the "wild" landscaping, and then post-wild landscaping paradigms, permaculture-designed forest gardening not only preserves and increases biodiversity, but it also maximizes the potential to create habitat for pressured wildlife, catches, cleans  and infiltrates water, dramatically reduces (if not eliminates) our dependence on finite petrochemicals, and sequesters more carbon! Most importantly, it reduces our negative ecological, climate and social impact by helping us grow some of our own food, in the easiest way possible. Moreover, scientists tell us we need to maximize forests if we want to reduce the impacts of climate change. And so the "food forest" has arrived as the new model for the ideal eco-friendly, conscientious landscape design.

(London Glades forest garden, which won top honors for future-friendly gardening at the prestigious Hampton Court Flower Show.)

Forest gardening is now widely being called "the oldest human landuse" by academics across many disciplines, with traditional systems across Europe being recognized as important elements of national culture and heritage. But while the western world had largely forgotten these systems, Indigenous communities around the world, especially in the tropics, have kept these systems alive as vital lifelines and important resources. In fact, modern researchers are documenting how these systems allow human societies to harvest the energy of "ecosystem services" in ways that decrease poverty, lessen oppression, mitigate the human impact on wildlife and biodiversity, provide community resilience and autonomy, reduce work hours, and enhance public health (McConnel, Goutum, United Nations, etc.). It was these systems that inspired the first modern Western forest gardens, especially that of Robert Hart. 

Slowly at first, starting with the earliest visitors to Robert Hart's forest garden in Shropshire, this most modern/most ancient form of landscape captured people's imaginations: to live surrounded by a landscape of bountiful food, regulated by natural ecosystem services. And then they began to spread like wildfire, with models springing up in cities throughout the western world. 

(The famous Pensioner's Garden at the Chelsea Flower Show, top honors, modelled after a traditional English form of forest garden.)

Their influence began to be felt in the world of high landscape design as post-wild, naturalistic landscapers began including more edibles into their work, creating little edible ecosystems that were - in a sense - already forest gardens. 

(Food, medicine, comfort, nature...) 

Quickly, the idiom became a dominant force in aesthetic garden design with the famous Pensioner's garden at the Chelsea flower show. This now-famous garden, modelled after the traditional "cottage garden" cultural icon - recognized as a form of forest garden integrating food, flowers, teas, medicines together in a half-wild natruralistic planting - stoked the fires of the public imagination world wide.

 (Kate Frey, ornamental agro-ecology with fruits like polarded grapes, vegetables, herbs, and flowers.)

The forest gardens kept coming as designers like Kate Frey also took top honors the Chelsea Flower Show, perhaps the world's most prestigious garden competition, with a naturalistic ecosystem of edible plants, wild medicines, and wildlife habitat in a low-maintenance assembly that has been described as an unofficial forest garden. The edible ecological gardens she's gone on to design have been excellent models for what post-wild edible landscaping could achieve in terms of beauty and comfort. 

(London Glades, photo via the Telegraph)

And now, the London Glades, an official forest garden, designed with the Permaculture system, has won a gold medal at the Hampton Court Palace flower show, another of the world's most prestigous competitions! And, at first glance, they nailed it! This is a beautiful example of the form. Of course, there's more to a forest garden than beauty, and I would need to look over goals, production objectives, required inputs, desired uses, plant selections and so on, to really know if this is a great forest garden. But, since forest gardens are really about meeting specific needs, and I beleive the primary objective  here was beauty, then I think this is a wonderful example. To find out more, view plans and see some mock-ups, visit: http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/london-glades. 

(London Glades, Telegraph.)

The time of forest gardens as an aesthetic medium has come, for any community-minded, conscientous people who want to reconnect with nature while doing one of the single most important things they can do to reduce their negative climate, ecological and social impact. In a world where political solutions seem hard-won and often ephemeral, this is a source of hope, a form of direct cultural transformation we can take action on right outside our door, at our place of work, at an empty lot or bike-trail near our homes....

(Aesthetic home forest garden at Lillie House.)

And  finally, a small community of aesthetic-minded gardeners have been working to refine the aesthetics, functionality and comfort of these gardens to move them beyond mere low-maintenance food gardens, but to make models for truly attractive, viable gardens for the home, business or public landscape. Indeed, at Lillie House, we take pride in matching forest garden designs to the architecture, community character and "genii loci" of each place, such as our front yard Jardin de Cure  modelled after a historically-acurate style of garden that was popular when our house was built!   

(Jardin de Cure, another traditional European forest garden with ancient origins.)

If you would like to visit us here and experience a few different models for what a home forest garden can be like, feel free to send us an email at lillie.house.kzoo@gmail.com or connect with us on Facebook. We have an Introduction to Forest Gardening class coming up on Sunday, August 20th, and may schedule another session for a weeknight around that time. 

(Lillie House.)

Permaculture Life Design: "Wealth"

(Monarda in our home food forest garden)

As "a system for designing human habitats to meet our needs," Permaculture can be used to improve the function of ANY "structure" we "inhabit," including invisible structures like economies. 

Its basic method is to emulate the processes in nature that make natural systems accumulate life-enhancing energies such as water, fertlility and energy, rather than constantly declining the way most man-made things do. 

(A "Forest garden" modelled after a natural ecosystem, to grow more fertile over time.)

Those same principles can be used to design our home economies so that our families can grow "wealthier" over time naturally and effortlessly. 

Here, I use the word wealth to mean something more than money, which is a poor measure of "wealth" for most people. I've written about what I would consider to be true wealth here: http://lilliehouse.blogspot.com/2014/11/paths-to-alternative-wealth.html 

"Wealth" might mean different things to different people, but since most of us never define what we're actually after, the pursuit of money often leads us astray, getting in the way of accumulating the things that would truly make us feel wealthy. 

(time spent in our "home office" makes me feel wealthy)

But once we know what we're after, a little thoughtful design can help us achieve it. 

One tool from the early Permaculture movement that has been very helpful to us in designing our own home "microeconomy" is the idea of classifying one's assets into three categories:

Degenerative Assets are those which break down and decline quickly, requiring regular upkeep and maintenance. This could include cars, conventional landscaping, cell-phones or poorly contructed houses. These days, many of our consumer goods are actually designed to break faster in order to stave off economic decline. This is called Planned Obsolescence. There's nothing necessarily wrong with these items, but each one we own extracts an ongoing price from us in order to keep it going. If we have more of these than we can "pay for" with our self-reliant lifestyle, then we will need an outside income to keep them going. And If we have too many of these, that price becomes more than we can afford, putting us in a position of where we have to let some of our possessions convert into "chaos" or waste. 

Generative Assets on the other hand, are "durable assets" that help us become producers instead of consumers. Cider mills, garden tools, sewing machines, carpentry equipment all help us create something useful, saving us time and money, and generating value that can help us grow wealthier. Garden plants and kitchen tools help us generate delicious meals.

Procreative Assets are those that can self-replicate, truly growing "wealth." These are usually natural systems. Fruit trees are a procreative asset that both generates value for us in the form of fruit and generates more fruit trees, creating a positive feedback loop in our life. A "food forest" is a procreative asset that meets a wide variety of our needs while generating the plant material for new food forests. But it's important to note that you can have too much of a good thing. Once you have more fruit than you can harvest and more trees than you can tend, these systems can actually create a burden for you. Energy streams that can't be harvested into productivity convert into chaos in our lives, creating weedy food forests, angry neighbors, many fruit pests, etc. 

(A "procreative asset")

One caveat I add to this idea is that these systems are only TRULY "generative" or "procreative" if they function and can be maintained with a POSITIVE return on investment. Any system or possession that costs us more to maintain than we get out of it is just as big a burden as any degenerative asset. Permaculture co-founder Bill Mollison explained this using Permaculture's ethic of "people care," saying that a "solution" or "purchase" that adds to someone's work load rather than decreasing it is not "caring for people" and hence, not Permaculture. 

And a second caveat is that not everything fits neatly into one category. But even if it isn't a perfect system, considering these three asset classes each time we make a purchase helps us put our home economy in order. And it's an entry point for visualizing the "balance" of our purchases. It helps us understand that if we're not careful, we will not "own" our possessions, but become slaves to them, as Thoreau warned. 

This leads us to buy items that are durable and well-made, understanding that each poorly-made item adds to our burden, our upkeep costs and maintenance time. And if we can find a ballance where we have enough procreative and generative assets that they naturally "pay" for the upkeep on our "degenerative" assets, plus produce a small surplus to reinvest, then we have positioned ourselves to grow wealthy and become independent and self-reliant over time in the way an ecosystem does. 

This same thinking can be used to create wealthy neighborhoods, families, blocks, cities and even wealthy countries....

------------------------

A Forest Garden for Every Occasion

While "Food Forests" or "Forest Gardens" have become something of a gardening fad these days, there's really nothing new about them at all. In fact, some academic sources have begun calling them "the world's oldest land use."  

In my opinion, we modern "Forest Gardeners" have a lot to learn from the traditional, slowly-evolved gardens that were once the backbone of cultures around the world. Researchers across many disciplines from Agronomy and economics to ecology and anthropology have delved deeply into the well-known, ancient food forests across the Asian and African tropics (as well as the Amazon, which some researchers have begun to charactarize as the world's largest food forest!) with some of the most famous being the "Home Gardens" of Kerala, India, that inspired the modern Food Forest trend. And as we come to understand how those systems function, both socially and ecologically, we're recognizing their universality, seeing well-developed and culturally appropriate Forest Garden systems in the pre-columbian Americas, and even in the temperate and cold regions of North Asia, Northern Scandinavia, Russia, the "black forest" of Germany, the Mediterranean, and the British Islands. 

Looking at all these long-lasting, highly successful systems, it's amazing how much they have in common, and to me, that implies that there are a few patterns for us to learn from and emulate if we want our Forest Gardens to have similar staying power. 

One of these universal patterns is a recognition of proximity: people have different sorts of forest gardens depending on how far they are from home. Permaculture Designers honor this traditional wisdom with the concept of different "zones" the further away you are from home. 

Based on this wisdom, many of these traditional forest gardening cultures developed two different systems, one for home and a second system for the public commons further from home.

There are now some nice studies of how these distinct home and public garden systems work in traditional cultures, such as this one: 

http://www.gerrymarten.com/traditional-agriculture/pdfs/Traditional-Agriculture-chapter-06.pdf 

In these systems, home Forest Gardens provide families with luxurious high-value fruits and vegetables, a wide variety of spices and herbs, the majority of their food and some excess for trade and income, and of course, beautiful living space. These crops require daily care and attention to thrive but are well worth the effort, if placed close to the home where that attention happens naturally without special effort.

Meanwhile, the public systems rely heavily on nature and succession to do the work, since they're far from  home and travel amplifies the "costs" of human labor and energy inputs. These systems are typically harvested collectively for commuity income, fibre, building materials, low-maintenance calorie crops, and a variety of low-maintenance fruit, vegetables, and spices for the market that can be grown extensively working with sucession. 

Many of these lots are visited just once a year--or less--because harvest and nature provides almost all the management. These are the famous "swidden" systems of the old world that start with clearing old food forest for lumber, planting new trees along with a ground cover of anual crops, and provide a cascade of different crops as the forest matures, until it's time to clear it again in 15 or 20 years. 

(Photo: http://press.anu.edu.au/apps/bookworm/view/Transcending+the+Culture–Nature+Divide+in+Cultural+Heritage/10901/ch14-oconnor.xhtml)

Beyond the tropics, the traditional temperate garden systems of Europe also evolved public and private versions that might make appropraite models for us in the Great Lakes Region. Up until the "green revolution" driven by fossil fuels, Medieval Great Britain, for example, evolved a complex system where the famous "cottage garden" was the centerpiece of home health and nutrition, as a home Forest Garden of high value fruit trees that require pampering, mingle with perennial and anual vegetables, flowers, and medicines growing together in an ecological assemblage that today would look "wild" to the modern gardener. 

Next, there were community "allotments" inside the settlement and close to the living quarters, where low-labor cultivated fruit trees and perennials and self-sown vegetables kept maintenance low. 

Beyond that in an outer zone from the community was the cultivated farmland where grains were grown communally, integrated with a Forest Garden system of Multi-purpose "hedgerows" of wild (or semi-wild) fruit, medicinal plants, building materials, fuel, vegetables, mushrooms and wild game. 

Wood for fuel, construction and crafts was grown in managed Forest Garden systems called copses, where shade-loving vegetables and medicines, chestnuts and hazelnuts, a wide variety of mushrooms and game were also harvested. This system of common hedgerows and coppice lots was also freely used by families and farmers to graze and fatten their livestock. This system changed and evolved along with the culture, but remained in some vestigal form right up until oil came to dominate our lives. 

A very similar system evolved in France, with its famous hedgerows, communal woodlands, and semi-managed (by grazing) common hillsides where villagers would collect medicinal and culinary herbs, such as the famous "Herb du Provence." 

Meanwhile, the "Jardin de Cure," or Parishiner's Garden, may have been the original multi-purpose, ecological "Permaculture Community Garden" and "Edible Landscaping!" 

These gardens, usually centrally located at the village church, were created by village volunteers for their busy Curate, the leader of their church. They had to be multi-functional, beautiful, and work with nature to be low-maintenance. They needed to provide the Curate and his Parish a beautiful spiritual place for contemplation and comfort in times of crisis. And they also had to grow high quailty fruits and vegetables for the Curate as well as special church celebrations, cut flowers for weddings, funerals and holidays, and also medicinal herbs--as the Curate, often the most learned man in the village, would also function as a healer. And the system of formal beds with semi-wild informal polyculture plantings allowed village volunteers to take care of it in their spare time. 

Up to now, most modern public and community Forest Gardens in the US have been designed to be demonstrations  of what could be done at home. I've visited a few that even included demonstration "zone 1" garden areas, modeling what should be done right outside of someone's front door, even though the nearest front door was at least a mile away. 

These are great gardens that filled a necessary educational role, and provided design opportunities for new designers. But now that home forest gardens (actually at people's homes!) are becoming common across America, I would encourage the next generation of projects to aim to reflect the traditional common sense of proximity, and to research and demonstrate the value that Forest Gardens can bring to the real public commons. 

To think about it in Permaculture terms, almost all public and community Forest Gardens are going to be in zone 4! So, rather than demonstrate "zone 1 and 2" on those sites, we should figure out how to demonstrate the concept of zones by designing great zone 4 gardens that really make sense!

Examining these traditional home and public systems, here are some patterns we can begin to learn from:

Home Forest Gardens:

--Extremely high diversity--people like to collect plants!

--More intensive: high-input items like cultivated fruits, fruits that REQUIRE harvest, more anual vegetables, salad crops, etc. This is where you'll find difficult fruits like dessert apples and plums.

--Emphasis on low-processing, high nutrition food crops to be used fresh. 

--Multi-purose landscape that integrates food production into PRIVATE yard functions such as home parties, contemplation, outdoor cooking, relaxation...

--Uses human labor to plant and maintain select plant specimens such as grafted trees. 

--Provide families with fresh fruit and vegetables, medicines, a beautiful home environment, excess production can be "scaled up" for income, recreation (gardening)

Public Agriforest Systems:

--Lower diversity, only aggressive plants that will fend for themselves if neglected.

--Plants appropriate for the stage of succession, ie. pioneer species in young gardens. 

--Very extensive, plants that rely on nature and succession to tend them, such as wild edibles, "weeds," berries, wild fruits, etc. 

--Emphasis on low-maintenance: high-calorie food crops like corn, squash and grains, durable foods like spices, animal fodder (animals don't typically require pampered and perfect fruits and vegetables,) and non-food crops like building and crafting materials. 

--Multi-purpose landscape that integrates food production into PUBLIC functions such as farming, hunting, travel (road-sides) community meeting space, religious worship, etc. 

--Largely relies on natural systems and succession. For a temperate example, look at the "dead hedging" and "tapestry hedge" systems of Britain and France, where a rudimentary fence was made of wood and stone, understanding that birds would perch there and other animals would then inhabit the "hedge," and their droppings would plant high-value edible plants. Meanwhile, these systems were guided by throwing down seeds and selecting for the most desirable species as the "hedge" filled in. 

--Provides a community with the VALUE of fuel, building materials, jobs, foraged "wild" fruits and vegetables, wildlife habitat--and MOST IMPORTANTLY, they do this without creating a burden for the community that has to be maintained with "volunteer" labor, fossil fuels and ongoing inputs. 

To me, the most important thing we can learn from these dual traditional systems is that if we're asking "who will maintain it and how will it be maintained?" then we're asking the wrong question. Either, it's private and that answer is obvious, or it's public, and it would traditionally be designed so that use, harvest and natural succession provide most of the maintenance required. 

All of America's new public and community Forest Gardens represent an inspiring view of what we can accomplish when we work together. And it's even more inspiring for me to think of what the future could bring, as these systems evolve to better serve the American landscape and bring value to American communities. More importantly, as a Permaculturist and community member, I look forward to public projects that compliment the forest garden I have at home in the way they do in traditional cultures.