Forest Gardening
Planting Trees - Strategies for Survival
Every year more than one million trees are planted on public and private properties throughout North America, these are not the trees are not planted as a part of a reforestation project, they are the trees that we use for personal and community ambiance. Of these trees, less than 50 percent will survive more than two years.
Forest gardening (also known as 3-Dimensional Gardening) is a food production and land management system based on replicating woodland edge ecosystems, substituting trees (such as fruit or nut trees), bushes, shrubs, herbs and vegetables which have yields directly useful to humankind. In part based on the model of the Keralan 'home gardens', forest gardening has been pionered by the late Robert Hart, whose one eighth of an acre plot at Wenlock Edge in Shropshire has been described as possibly the only fully developed working permaculture site in the UK. Robert began the project over thirty years ago with the intention of providing a healthy and therapuetic environment for himself and his brother Lacon, born with severe learning disabilities. Starting as relatively conventional smallholders, Robert soon