Teeming With Life & Food – How To Make A Healthy Forest Garden

One of the ways to ensure a really healthy forest garden run on organic principles is to create maximum biodiversity. This means not only filling the garden with fruit, nuts, herbs and perennial and annual vegetables, but also adding flowers, wild berries and wildlife habitats.

Over the years, a few permaculturists have looked askance at our wildflower meadows. A recent comment was, “You’ve got loads of room for more trees!” but we don’t think so. The diversity makes our garden incredibly robust, a haven for companion species who take care of the pests.

The wildflower meadows are divided by a home-made ‘barrow’. Nearest the house is the spring meadow. When the flowers are over we use this space for sunbathing, playing, camping and generally hanging out. The summer meadow is above the barrow. The barrow itself was designed as a seat, facing the sunset, but nature has colonised it. It is full of marjoram, oxe-eye daisies, and cowslips. Ants also love it and green woodpeckers come and feast there later in the year. There are also tiny burrows made by field mice and voles.

The spring meadow starts with snowdrops and progresses through to crocuses, daffodils and narcissi. Our great joy is the self-seeding cowslips that are blooming now as well as the snakes head fritillaries. I love their chequered bells. The cowslips are particularly useful as early bumble bee forage. The bees come to them and then move on to pollinate the early blooming cherry. Later on English bluebells will bloom by the hedge mixed the delicate smell of wild garlic, a potent native herb that is delicious in cooking and a real tonic.

Already the skylark is singing overhead, and we have our own flock of visiting pheasants who browse each day. They politely don’t walk on the raised beds or eat our vegetables, more than I can say of the pigeons who require bird scarers (old CDs) which hang from the small trees.

The summer meadow is full of marjoram, it is our chalk downland ‘weed’. We also grow ox-eye daisies, knapweed, white and red campion, salad burnet, small scabious, wild sorrel and black medic (and more). There’s a variety of grasses too, including the delicate quaking grass, appropriately called Briza media. The garden is too small to graze sheep (the traditional way of managing these meadow species), so we cut it in autumn after the seed has dropped and mulch the trees with the hay. If flowers grow under the fruit trees in the mulch we leave them. We are sterner with the grasses.

Butterflies, especially the Chalkhill Blues (Polyommatus coridon) love the flowers and herbs. Small mammals burrow under the soil and in the hedgerow (we don’t have dormice but we do have wood mice) and buzzards and hawks hover overhead. We’ll keep adding the diversity and sow more varieties like yellow rattle in the autumn to plug plant next spring.

We also build up big piles of rotting logs for the common lizards, slowworms and beetles and leave piles of brashing under the walnut tree.

Bumble bees love the gentle chaos of the rough grassland and made their nests in small holes. We have dug a variety of ponds (from salvaged butler sinks and bathtubs to ones lined with membranes) for frogs and toads as well as damsel and dragonflies and put up a variety of nest boxes for birds. When I get a moment I want to build a special hibernaculum, a haven for our amphibians and reptiles, and another hedgehog box as the old one has collapsed. I’ll let you know how these projects go.

Meanwhile, I recommend that gardeners mix up edibles with native trees, hedgerows and wildflowers as much as space will allow. It will bring in the birds, insects, reptiles, mammals and amphibians and reduce the number of slugs and aphids. But besides being organic good practise, it is also a joy to the spirit, especially after a long, cold winter.

Maddy Harland is the editor of Permaculture Magazine – inspiration for sustainable living. To read a sample copy click here. To support this independent publications please subscribe digitally for just £10 (approx $13.40) or to the paper edition (which will save you at least 20% of the cover price).

Flower and bee photography courtesy of Gail Harland.

Our Permaculture Garden

Last night my family and our permaculture garden appeared on Alys Fowler's new series 'The Edible Garden' on BBC2. If you didn't see it and you live in the UK you can watch it on iPlayer. If you live outside the zone it's on YouTube.

It was weird being on TV and we were nervous, mainly because we have devoted 20 years of our lives to publishing and promoting permaculture to as many people as possible in the world. Permaculture is regarded as a way of growing food and even a design method for creating sustainable communities. It is all that and more. Permaculture has helped us connect deeply with the land – not just our garden – but the landscape in which we live and breathe. We have learnt to read its language. It has been the most profound of life enhancers for us and it has made us happy. It was therefore important to present permaculture in the best light possible – to share its subtleties and magic. Not easy in three minutes!

The garden was filmed in late July when the wildflowers are setting seed and everything is a riot of growth. I thought you might like to see it this morning with the spring flowers under the budding fruit trees. I love this time of year – actually I love all the seasons of the year – but the flowers that bloom after a long winter feed the soul.

We grow snowdrops for just that reason under fruit trees as well as daffodils. We like to have a succession of flowers. We also plant comfrey and cut it to add fertility. Sometimes it goes to flower and the air is full of the drone of huge bumble bees feasting on pollen.

Violets have spontaneously volunteered in the meadow grass. Nature gardens all by herself.

But we did plant cowslips that seed themselves all over the garden. One day I'll be able to make cowslip wine.

Here's the veg garden full of leeks and garlic waking up in the early morning light, surrounded by the new growth of comfrey.

There's new seeds in the greenhouse and some mizuna that I sowed in early winter for the hungry gap. And perennial kale in the forest garden area that is recovering from an onslaught from hungry marauding pigeons.

We don't pretend to be self-sufficient in food. I'd need a polytunnel for that and to garden full time, but we are increasingly self-reliant. My great joy is watching nature share the garden with the veg, fruit and nuts. No sprays, no chemical pest control, just flowers, food and teaming diversity...

Maddy Harland is the editor of Permaculture Magazine – inspiration for sustainable living. To read a sample copy click here. To support this independent publications please subscribe digitally for just £10 (approx $13.40) or to the paper edition (which will save you at least 20% of the cover price)