Forest Gardening - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Hart was the pioneer of Forest Gardening in the UK. His work inspired many others to pursue his vision of a more self-sufficient and vibrant community based on agroforestry techniques.

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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.