Prologue

THE MINI-FOREST

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.

I had a vision of mini-forests in millions of back-gardens. To demonstrate what I had in mind, with my gardener and partner, Garnet Jones, I converted a small orchard of apples and pears into a Forest Garden, comprising upwards of seventy species and varieties of fruit and nut trees, bushes and climbers as well as herbs and perennial vegetables.

Designed to achieve the utmost economy of space and labour, it is a tiny imitation of the natural forest. 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.

Though I worked out the system for myself, I have since discovered that peasants have been creating similar structures for hundreds or even thousands of years in many parts of the world, especially in tropical areas where space is limited by population pressure; among isolated communities living on islands and in oases, remote from centres of supply and distribution, where a degree of self-sufficiency is essential for survival. Some of these Forest Gardens, or ‘Homegardens’ as they are more commonly called, are found on the sites of ancient civilisations such as those of the Maya and Zapotecs in Mexico and Central America, the Benin in West Africa, the Buddhist kingdom of Sri Lanka and the Hindu kingdom of Java. It must be assumed that those civilisations encouraged a decentralist organisation of society, with numerous self-sustaining communities dedicated to all-round human development, as opposed to the empires which imposed uniformity on their subjects and monocultures on the land.

My own first introduction to the traditional homegarden was in an article on Mexico in Mother Earth, the former organ of the Soil Association. ‘Mexico is the pattern of ecology,’ the author wrote, ‘and so, in spite of all her natural shortcomings, can teach us a lot… The indio’s knowledge and practice of plant associations goes much further than ours, which is by comparison elementary. Their huertos (orchards) are mostly round the houses… they are amazing shambles of banana and coffee bushes, orange and lime trees, towered over by mango and zapote and mamey trees, all wild trees of the indigenous forest whose fruits are delicious and wholesome.’

Diversity is the keynote of the forest garden concept, but it must be an ordered diversity, governed by the principles and laws of plant symbiosis; all plants must be compatible with each other. Most forest gardens are designed primarily to meet the basic needs of the cultivators and their families for food, fuel, fibres, timber and other necessities, but some also include a cash component.

The forest garden is the most productive of all forms of land use. Most average about half a hectare in extent and this small area can support a family of up to ten people. It therefore offers the most constructive answer to the population explosion. Java, which has a greater concentration of forest gardens, or pekarangan, than anywhere else, is one of the most densely populated rural areas in the world. Yet the landscape does not present an urbanised appearance, as most of the villages are built of local materials and concealed behind dense screens of greenery.

The forest garden is far more than a system for supplying mankind’s material needs. It is a way of life and it also supplies people’s spiritual needs by its beauty and the wealth of wild life that it attracts.