Robert Hart

Pic by Graham Burnett www.spiralseed.co.uk

Robert Hart's Forest Garden

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Robert Hart's dedication to the forest garden inspired many of the new generation of environmental landscape designers in the west, although many of the ideas originated in Southern Africa and Southern India

robert hart

pic credit: Fransje de Waard

"Obviously, few of us are in a position to restore the forests.. But tens of millions of us have gardens, or access to open spaces such as industrial wastelands, where trees can be planted. and if full advantage can be taken of the potentialities that are available even in heavily built up areas, new "city forests" can arise..." (Robert A.de J.Hart)

After thirty years of study, research and practical experience in Agroforestry, Robert Hart established a small model forest garden on his farm on Wenlock Edge, a model that could be repeated many thousands of times even by those who possess only small town gardens.

'The Forest Garden can enable a family to enjoy a considerable degree of self-sufficiency, with minimal labour', for some seven months of the year, providing the very best foods for building up positive health. It is a miniature reproduction of the self-maintaining eco-system of the natural forest, consisting entirely of fruit and nut trees and bushes, perennial and self-seeding vegetables and culinary and medicinal herbs.

Robert Hart wrote: 'It is no good waiting for the Powers-That-Be to take decisive action in the infinitely serious crisis caused by wholesale forest destruction, curbed and restricted as they are by blind prejudice and vested interests. Those who care, the ordinary people, should take action themselves to restore the earth's depleted forest cover, even though they may live in cities.'

Once established after about two years, the Forest Garden is self-perpetuating, self-fertilising, self-watering, self-mulching, self-weed-suppressing, self-pollinating, self-healing and highly resistant to pests and diseases. The only work required is pruning, controlling plants that seek to encroach on each other, and mulching with compost once a year, after the herbaceous plants die down in the late autumn.

It is:- Self-perpetuating, because all plants are perennial or active seed-seekers, such as borage and cress; self-fertilising, because deep-rooting trees, bushes and herbs draw upon minerals in the subsoil and make them available to their neighbours, and because the complex should include edible legumes such as lucerne, which inject nitrogen into the soil.

'Self-watering, because deep-rooting plants tap the spring-veins in the subsoil' - Self-watering, because deep-rooting plants tap the spring-veins in the subsoil, even at times of drought, and pump up water for the benefit of the whole eco-system. - Self-mulching and self-weed-suppressing, because the scheme includes rapidly spreading herbs, such as the mints, and perennial vegetables, such as Good King Henry, which soon cover all the ground between the trees and bushes and thus create a permanent mulch. In fact, one main problem is to check their pervasiveness in the interests of less dominating plants. - Self-pollinating, because all the fruit and nut trees are chosen to be mutually compatible for pollinating purposes - unless self-fertile - and also because the scheme includes many aromatic herbs and vegetables such as tree-onions and wild garlic, which undoubtedly exert curative influences on their neighbours. - Resistant to pests and diseases, not only on account of the aromatic plants but also because any complex consisting of a wide spectrum of different plants does not allow the build up of epidemics such as is formed in monocultures.

The scheme is very highly intensive, making use of all seven 'storeys' found in the natural forest for the production of economic plants. These 'storeys' are:

In order to achieve maximum economy of space, these devices are employed:

There is a 'family tree', comprising three compatible varieties of English eating apples, Sunset, Discovery and Laxton's Fortune, grafted on to a single root stock.

Conventional horticulturalists will object that food plants cannot achieve full productivity when planted in such close proximity to each other. But, as the natural forest and even the herbaceous flower border demonstrate, many plants thrive best when grown close to plants of other species. The reasons for this are contained in the science of plant symbiosis, about which very little research has been undertaken, since Ehrenfried Pfeiffer invented his system of 'sensitive crystallisation'. This is a study which must be extensively developed if Agroforestry is to attain its full potential.

The Forest Garden's produce is health-promoting: just as in the 16th and 17th centuries, when England produced an amazing number of men (--and women!) of exceptional hardihood and genius, a standard article of diet was a salad, called 'sallet' or 'salgamundy', comprising a wide variety of cultivated and wild vegetables, fruits and herbs.

As for the Forest Garden helping restore the earth's forest cover, if ten trees were planted in a hundred thousand gardens, that would amount to a million trees. Quite a forest!

Robert Hart died in March 2000. A booklet entitled 'The Forest Garden' by Robert Hart is available from the Institute for Social Inventions (£3-25p incl. p&p, or order online), and a full-length book with colour photos, 'Forest Gardening' is published by Green Books (£7-95, ISBN 1 870098 44 7). There are now many Forest Gardens modelled on his and Robert's insight and knowledge has inspired a generation of environmentnal designers, gardeners and horticulturalists.