Forest Gardens - The Garden of the Future?
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The garden of the future?
Jill Tunstall, Guardian
Forest gardens that replicate woodland ecosystems provide food, fuel and medicine, support wildlife, and could boom in popularity as the climate changes. Jill Tunstall explores a horticultural haven
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Imagine a garden that needs no weeding, watering, digging or feeding and can be left to look after itself for weeks, even months, on end. Go further: it's organic, wildlife-friendly, disease resistant, reduces your weekly food bill and brings fashionable foraging to your doorstep.
It might sound too good to be true, but this garden can be a reality for anyone with some outdoor space, whether it's the backyard of an inner-city terrace or the grounds of a country vicarage.
Just over a year ago Jennifer Lauruol's modest garden at her home on a new housing estate in Lancaster amounted to little more than a lawn that the previous owner's dog had been peeing on for the past four years. Others may have seen stained grass, but Lauruol's vision was to mimic a system of planting that goes back to the Aztecs but was reinterpreted by the late Robert Hart, a visionary gardener who brought the idea to Britain in the 1960s and named it "forest gardening".
Studying the woodlands and forest around his Wenlock Edge home on the Shropshire/Wales border, Hart realised that they were both productive and self-maintaining. He set about rearranging his own garden on forest principles with edible layers of self-sustaining perennials that would provide food, fuel and medicines, as well as support wildlife. His philosophy was recorded in two books, The Forest Garden and Beyond the Forest Garden (Green Books), both published shortly before he died in 2000.
It was this idea that Lauruol, a garden designer herself, envisaged at her semi. As soon as she moved in she got busy planting 14 trees and importing tonnes of bark chippings to mimic the self-mulching forest floor.
"It's all about layers and building them up year on year," says Lauruol, who is still at the investment stage; putting in trees, shrubs and vines which will eventually largely look after themselves. Hart had identified seven layers: roots, ground cover, herb layer, fruiting shrubs, dwarf trees, tree canopy and the high canopy (or vertical layer), all of which coexist happily within their own ecosystem. In Lauruol's garden, apple, plum and cherry trees will soon be underplanted with shade-tolerant fruiting shrubs once the trees are established.
"And underneath I've got herbs and salad leaves such as these dandelions, which I eat regularly," she says. "And I planted nettle."
(6 December 2007)
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