Beneath the trees
A CHANCE MEET WITH AN INFLUENTIAL LANDSCAPE DESIGNER INSPIRED CLAIRE LEADBITTER TO TURN A BARE PADDOCK INTO A FOREST GARDEN, NOURISHING BOTH LAND AND FAMILY
The story so far
When I met Mary Reynolds, she was working on her book The Garden
Awakening and needed help to bring it to fruition. Much of her writing resonated with my partner Joe and me, so we were happy to create a forest garden with her. Her central idea is that we are not just gardeners controlling an outdoor space, but we work in harmony with the land and have a responsibility to feed the soil.
Four years ago, my eldest daughter went away to study, leaving us with one less horse and an empty quarter-acre paddock. It was an ideal spot to start our forest garden and put these ideas into practice. With Mary’s help (and two pigs to clear the land), we took the plunge. Realising her ideas has been an ongoing experiment, which has had a tremendously positive effect on all of us.
More than wood
Mary’s book is a practical guide based on her own instinctive methods of forest gardening, and those of Japanese farmer and gardener Masanobu Fukuoka, pioneer of ‘natural farming’. Forest gardening is a way of growing perennial crops in multiple layers, which mimic the natural patterns of a multitiered, medium stage, woodland system. Growing our own food this way nourishes the land, and ourselves, and provides habitats for wildlife above and below the soil. It feels like a real chance to do something powerful for our family and our land.
We use no chemicals, only witches’ brews of nettles and comfrey as fertilisers. We have learnt that there are always alternatives to using poisons on the land. Instead of manicured lawns, we have swathes of clover and mustard alongside
other nitrogen-fixing plants that attract and feed insects. I’m proud of creating an environment without harming anything on purpose. We might have a few more ‘weeds’, but so what? If I really don’t want them, then I get down on my knees and remove them at the root. We don’t dig over the earth, either. Mary explained that an intricate and massive mycelium network, connecting and helping all plants, exists just under the soil. We’re introducing a lot of organic matter as mulches instead, and planting down through these layers, rather than digging over a bed in a more traditional way.
Simple pleasures
One key element of Mary’s gardens is a wishing circle: a place to sit, wish and dream, built with our own hands and with our family’s needs in mind. It has ten silver birches which stand sentinel around my personal wishing tree – a hawthorn. It is the best spot in the world!
Our greatest successes
We’re four years into the project and have come a long way from the original bare paddock. It’s been hard but so rewarding. Eventually, there should be little for the human (ie, me) to do when all the seven layers of the forest garden have grown to maturity. We have eight fruit and nut trees in the space that will become the canopy
“We might have a few more ‘weeds’ but so what? If I really don’t want them I get down on my knees and remove them at the root”
layer, and over the last couple of years we’ve added bigger shrubs to form the next tier down. The shelter belt hedging is made up of indigenous trees and shrubs, and we planted lots of interesting berry bushes. It’s been a massive learning curve for us, but we’re not going to stop. Joe already has his eye on another paddock to extend the FG into a BFG (Big Forest Garden!).
When it goes wrong
Trying to find the answers to things like how to suppress aggressive couch grass (solution: compost, cardboard boxes and heavy-duty mulching) is interesting and enlightening. As is dealing with all the birds, slugs, snails, dogs, frogs, chickens and myriad other creatures that seem to help and hinder in equal measure. Last year, for instance, my massive crop of boysenberries that I was patiently waiting to harvest and devour was demolished, practically overnight, by birds. This year I have my eye on the robbers and shall attempt to out-fox them.
The big picture
Everyone that comes into the garden has commented on its good energy. There is a very positive buzz here, and that’s not just from the bees! It is still a work in progress and, in regular gardening terms, it’s a challenge to overlook the hay mulch and nettles and other straggly bits. But there is beauty in this garden that’s rooted in its authenticity. It is a fairly wild space designed specifically to consider what lies above and beneath.
If we can all heal the little pieces of land that we are responsible for, we have the possibility of creating a network of interdependent, truly living places, and not just a patchwork of millions of collective acres of relatively dead, manicured lawns. Creating a forest garden is certainly not a fast track approach – but then what gardening project is? I do, however, have faith that eventually it will be a most beautiful and giving space. It already is and surely it can only get better.