Product Description

Designed to achieve the utmost economy of space and labour, a forest garden is a tiny imitation of a natural forest. Once established, it requires minimal maintenance, and can provide year-round produce of herbs, fruit, nuts and root and perennial vegetables. This book includes guidelines on how to design and maintain a forest garden, and lists recommended species for temperate, tropical and sub-tropical climates.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #340780 in Books
• Published on: 1996-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Rodney Aitchtey, The Vegetarian
"Forest Gardening is a worthy successor which has brought the essence of all his previous writings together... His own back garden has over a hundred different species and variety of plants... Robert Hart has written an invaluable philosophical manual for the practice of Self Sufficiency and the Good Life ahead." -

Fiona Anderson, Tree News
"Robert Hart's tiny forest garden in Shropshire, covering no more than an eighth of an acre, is quite unlike anything I have seen in Britain or elsewhere in Europe. It is almost tropical in its lushness and fertility, and overflows with an abundant and tantalising variety of things to eat... An inspirational, optimistic book."

Excerpted from Forest Gardening by Robert A de J Hart. Copyright © 1996. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
I HAVE A MINI-FOREST in my back-garden. It represents a pioneer experiment in restoring a tiny segment of the primaeval Long Forest, which once covered a wide area of the Shropshire Hills bioregion. Like the natural forest, it comprises a wide diversity of plants, occupying seven levels or 'storeys', but, unlike the natural forest, almost all its plants have been carefully chosen to meet human needs. It is, in fact, an attempt to create a model life-support system, which would enable a family or small community to achieve a considerable degree of self-sufficiency in basic necessities throughout the year, while enjoying health-giving exercise in a beautiful, unpolluted and stimulating environment.

My mini-forest is the culmination of many years' study and practice of the system that has come to be known as Agroforestry or Permaculture, and which many people, including myself, believe has a major role to play in the evolution of an 'alternative', holistic world order. A Green World. The world of Gaia.

Agroforestry is the generic term for methods of cultivation in which trees are grown in or at the edge of pastureland or in conjunction with crops. The trees are generally regarded as fulfilling multiple functions: conserving the environment, controlling groundwater, providing shade and shelter for livestock, as well as being sources of timber, fuel, fibres, fodder or food for human consumption. Permaculture (which lays special emphasis on a wide diversity of mainly perennial plants and on landscape design), is a comprehensive form of Agroforestry devised in the early 1970s by Bill Mollison of Australia.

Those who are concerned with the full implications of the ecological crisis which we now face generally agree that urgent steps should be taken to plant many millions of trees. In pondering how this could be achieved, I was haunted by the title of a book by the Australian mining engineer, farmer and landscape designer, P.A. Yeomans: The City Forest. It occurred to me that there was no reason why many of the desperately needed new trees should not be fruit-trees planted by the owners of town and surburban gardens, who would gain the bonus of growing nourishing food. If one could persuade 100,000 Londoners to plant just ten fruit-trees each, that would be a million trees - quite a forest! And if tree-planting programmes were pursued in urban areas around the world, a new worldwide City Forest would arise which would go some way towards compensating for the devastation of the tropical Rainforest.

Customer Reviews

Everyone can learn something from this book
If you have not yet read 'Forest Farming' by Douglas and Hart, then you may lack the background to fully appreciate this book. In 'Forest Farming' we are told that civilized man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints primarily because he has ploughed the hills with the loss of top soil. Crop-yielding trees offer the best medium for extending agriculture to hills, steep places, rocky places, and to the lands where rainfall is deficient. Every good Buddhist plants and sees the establishment of one tree at least every five years and this simple act multiplied six billion times would have a greater economic benefit for humankind than traditional development plans. The 'tool' with the greatest potentials for feeding men and animals, for regenerating the soil, for restoring water-systems, for controlling floods and droughts, for creating more benevolent micro-climates and more comfortable and stimulating living conditions for humanity, is the tree. Douglas and Hart point out that the deeper problem is ignorance as many crop-yielding trees and shrubs are currently ignored by farmers because agriculture in most parts of the world is geared to cereal growing and livestock rearing by conventional means, despite the fact that trees offer higher yields per acre. If the tree growing potentialities of city private gardens was fully recognized, suburban areas would not only have purer air and a more benevolent microclimate but a greater degree of self-sufficiency.

In this book Hart develops the case for the urban dweller to adopt forest gardening to achieve economy of space and labor while producing fruit, nuts, root and perennial vegetables and herbs. He provides the guidelines required for temperate, tropical and sub-tropical climates. "Like the forest it is arranged in seven 'storeys', with the original apple and pear trees constituting the 'canopy' and the other plants occupying the lower tiers. Thus the garden has a well-defined vertical dimension as well as horizontal ones. Now that it has been established for several years, I can affirm that it requires minimal maintenance, as the plants - nearly all perennials - largely look after themselves and are very healthy. The main work involved is that of cutting back plants that try to encroach on others. The wide diversity of species ensures that any small invasions of pests never reach epidemic proportions, as they tend to do under monocultural conditions. The large number of aromatic herbs creates a deliciously fragrant atmosphere, and, I am convinced, contributes to the pest-and-disease-resistance of the other plants. As we eat the herbs and perennial vegetables daily in our salads, the garden makes a significant contribution to our diet throughout the growing season, from the first herbs and wild garlic in March to the last apples in November."

The author goes on to warn us that we must seek ordered diversity governed by the laws of plant symbiosis but the results can be that a half hectare can support a family of up to ten people. Java has the greatest concentration of forest gardens yet is one of the most densely populated rural areas of the world. Forest gardening is more than a system for supplying mankind's material needs; it is a way of life which addresses man's spiritual needs by its beauty and the wealth of wildlife it attracts. In the early chapters we follow the author's development as he wrestles with the problem, concluding that: "if one could devise an integrated system of land-use consisting mainly of perennial plants - fruit and nut tress and bushes together with perennial vegetables and herbs - as well as a diet based on this mix, the task of achieving self-sufficiency would be vastly simplified. This is how I discovered agroforestry."

There are plenty of good tips such as this one on potatoes. "The champion exponent of this technique, the aim of which is to grow a colossal crop of potatoes from a single seed, was a Sussex villager, Tom Cooke, known as the Ace of Spuds. This was his procedure: large seed potatoes, well supplied with eyes, were soaked in a solution of liquid seaweed and water for an hour a week for six months, starting in October. During the winter Tom prepared his plot, allowing eight-foot squares for each seed. The site was excavated one-foot deep and filled with wheat straw, to which dry seaweed fertilizer was added after the straw had weathered and was almost black. On top of this came a layer of manure and soil mixed with more seaweed. The tubers were planted at the end of March or early April and covered with a thin dressing of straw. Then, at fortnightly intervals, the growing plants were earthed up with layers of straw, seaweed and soil until they reached a height of some 3-4 feet, sending out numerous side-shoots liberally supplied with tubers. After a series of foliar feeds with liquid seaweed, the harvest was eventually reached: over half a ton of potatoes from just six seeds!"

If you are an avid gardener there will surely be something new in this book; if you simply want to make your garden more productive and did not know of the seven story concept, you will find this book helpful; if you have been overwhelmed by the work in the garden you should concentrate on perennials as Hart has done; if you have just a small plot this book will help you get the maximum production and help you to eat healthily; if you would like to attract more wildlife to your garden, read this book. It is difficult to imagine anyone not profiting from Hart's theoretical and practical research.

Rubbish!
Sorry, but that’s the way it is. I bought this on the recommendation of an RHS gardening magazine I picked up in a hospital waiting room. The concept is fascinating – creating a garden that is producing food at every level, from the treetops down to root vegetables.

The book, though, is a total let-down. The first 40 odd-pages are wasted tree-pulp – if I’d wanted a biography of the author I’d have looked for one! This from someone who spends the rest of the book tub-thumping for ecology & sustainability!! Frankly, it would have been better titled with the sub-title, “Rediscovering Nature & Community in a Post-industrial Age”. That alone should give you a fair indication of the nature of the book. It’s a christian & vegan infected (& I quite deliberately choose ‘infected’ over ‘infused’!) polemic of Green meanderings.

Now, don’t get me wrong! If I wasn’t Green-inclined myself, I’d never have been interested in the subject in the first place. But I want a practical guide on how to create a productive, sustainable, chemical free, low maintenance garden, in my case in a fairly small space. Instead I got a lot of useless pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-science, & starry-eyed optimism.

The practical information in this book is almost entirely confined to the Appendices at the back and, to be perfectly honest, that is simply some brief information on flora, which is probably freely available as part of another source. In fact, it is! It’s called “How to make a Forest Garden” by Patrick Whitefield.. Luckily for me, I’d ordered it at exactly the same time as this one. If I’d only bought this effort, I’d possibly never have investigated the subject any further!

I'd award it No Stars if I could. Save your money for something useful &, just as the author would have wanted, save a tree or two at the same time – DON’T buy this!!