How to Create a Forest Garden

Hello, we're here today in a forest garden in North Pembrokeshire in Wales. A forest garden is a way of growing edible crops with nature. The key features of a forest garden is that you're providing food for yourself but you're also providing food and habitat for wildlife. A forest garden is a bit of a misnomer because really it could be any size. It could be acres or it could be your backyard. The kind of key principles about a forest garden is that it has an edible crop and that it is self-sustaining and good for wildlife. And even in this small area that we have here we have an apple tree which is your canopy layer and then we have some currant bushes down here and there's a ground cover which is a dwarfing comfrey which provides nutrients and potassium for the rest of the plants and it can be ornamental too. So we have a Juneberry obelisk which is a really really beautiful plant with beautiful flowers and berries in June. So another added benefit to a forest garden is the sheer amount of wildlife that you'll get and you can just about hear the bumblebees on this flowering autumn olive and you can probably hear the birds as well and this is the kind of habitat that you create by having taller plants and tall shrubs and trees right the way down to herbaceous perennials and the ground cover is providing a range of different habitats. So the majority of the productive plants you'll have in a forest garden will be non-native. For example this ebbing silverberry has beautiful red berries and a very fragrant flower as well and there are some other plants that you have in a forest garden which are near native. So for example this is an Italian alder which is much more adapted to drier conditions than our native alder. Fantastic nitrogen fixer and you can take off the lower branches and it will form a canopy and it can also be pollarded as well and then you have the native productive species like this hazel comes in a variety of different cultivars which are great for a nut crop. The bulk of your plants in a forest garden should be native where possible so that would be your windbreaks and your ground cover. For example this is a native meadow sweet which grows to about a meter tall and has beautiful white froth of flowers. So in terms of biodiversity the reason to be growing native plants is that they co-evolve with the native insects. So by having a diversity of native plants in your forest garden you're providing foodstuff for those insects. There are certain plants which are ideally suited for a forest garden. One of them is the comfrey. This is a dwarfing variety with beautiful flowers and it also provides nutrients as well for all the other fruiting bushes around the place and one of those fruiting bushes is a currant and these currants again are ideal forest garden plants very low maintenance very productive will grow in part shade as well and then we have the Cornelian cherry which has a very good crop of berries in the autumn. The idea for Hope Garden really comes from my work in climate activism. The vast majority of people want to have action on the climate emergency and they're not seeing it so we have to create the action ourselves we have to gather together ourselves. In my local village there's a space by the allotment and it's run by a community interest company. I asked them if they'd be willing to have a Hope Garden right next to the allotment to be used by their members and to be used by the community groups in that area and they're on board with the idea and so I've made a grant application. People will be talking about the ecological and climate emergency sat right in the middle of an example of what can be done to grow edible crops while simultaneously supporting biodiversity. So that's the kind of core idea behind it and to take that as a show garden at RHS Hampton Court and in this way to bring the discussion and to bring all the difficult topics and all the difficult conversations that aren't being had right into the very heart of the horticultural establishment some sort of green trojan horse if you will and out pop all these terribly radical and dangerous ideas but the ideas that really need to be talked about. The idea is to create a network of forest gardens is to see it more as a practice that can be adopted by multiple people so the effect is much much bigger. This is gardening that can benefit wildlife and you can get edible crops and it's more resilient and it locks in carbon. All these things if they're kind of rolled out across the country people can see there's a better way of gardening but also a better way of living as well.