Ideas in permaculture…
A new kind of forest
I first published this story on a now defunct website in 1997. It is about an idea of Peter Hardwick, who led bushfoods and other workshops as part of Robyn Francis’ permaculture education program at her Djanbung Gardens centre in Nimbin. I republish the story here because I think it an interesting model of bioregional development and in the hope that it stimulates people in other climates to develop similar models.
RAIN FALLS and flows downslope, carrying the loose soil that accumulates in the valley below. Washed by millennia of runoff, the hills take a rounded shape of steep upper and gentler lower slopes. Trees and shrubs cloak these slopes and assume a pattern based on elevation and soil depth, shade and wind tolerance and moisture requirements. NSW’s North Coast is a landscape shaped by water.
Other places, other cultures. Here, too, there are humid landscapes shaped by running water. And here, too, patterns of vegetation have evolved. But unlike Northern NSW, local agriculturists have come into the mountain forests to interplant the indigenous trees with those useful to people. Over time, what was a natural forest becomes one that produces the food, fodder, building materials and firewood needed by the village communities in the valley bottoms. These production forest looks the same as the natural forest because the agriculturists have copied its structure.
Peter Hardwick likes this modified, productive forest so much he would like to see it copied on the slopes of Northern NSW’s coastal ranges. His idea is to make slopes that were earlier cleared for grazing and farming into productive, perennial cropping systems. Peter wants to blend indigenous trees and shrubs, those that occur naturally in the region, with productive exotics from outside. The resulting system would reflect the soil, landform and geographic character of the region.
Before the loggers and farmers came moist rainforest covered the lower slopes and the coastal plain in what was known as the ‘Big Scrub’. Most of it has been cut out. Peter’s tree cropping system would not restore it but would develop a forest that produces not only for the needs of people but that stabilises the soils, restrains the rainwater and provides habitat for wildlife in much the same way as the Big Scrub did.
Productive agroforest the solution to erosion
Soil erosion is a problem in the seasonally wet subtropical climate of the far north coast of NSW. The solution, according to Peter, is an agroforestry model incorporating trees of different uses which would see the eroded lower slopes rehabilitated as productive farming systems and that would bring much the same environmental benefits as natural forests.
This system would restore environments damaged by grazing and farming. The plant communities would copy the structure of the natural ecosystem and both restore the land and provide people with their needs.
It was his work in designing and reestablishing native vegetation on damaged landscapes that inspired Peter to develop his concept of productive restoration forestry. Named after the Aboriginal tribe that inhabited the area, his Banjalung Permaculture System would establish the different types of vegetation in zones determined by species’ needs for light, soil type and moisture.
The Banjalung planting system
The natural ecology up to 100km inland of the coast consists of dry or wet sclerophyll (Eucalyptus dominated) forest or rainforest on the ridges, plateaus and the upper and lower slopes.
Peter’s Banjalung Permaculture System would retain remnant native vegetation and supplement it with productive forestry. Cabinet timbers, which would later be selectively logged, would be planted on the upper slopes. This could be a closed forest in structure, one in which the tree canopy covers 70 percent or more of the sky when viewed from below.
Where the ecology favours moist rainforest along the lower slopes, tropical tree crops would be established above the frost line. They would include nuts as well as indigenous and exotic fruits. The light requirement of fruiting trees and shrubs make an open forest structure — with a canopy covering less than 70 percent of the sky but more than 30 percent — more appropriate on these lower slopes.
Farm dams would be located along the keyline where the steeper upper slope changes grade to the shallower lower slope. Earthworks that harvest rainwater are more appropriately placed on the gentler lower slopes. Swales, excavated along the contour to minimise soil erosion, could be cut if needed. Alternatively, bunds — raised contour banks — could be built to retain or redirect runoff. Strips planted between the swales or bunds would grow into mixed orchards of indigenous and exotic fruits and nuts.
Villages and dwellings with their home orchard for household use would be built on these lower slopes. Even here, environmental design principles would be employed to treat household wastewater in reedbed biofiltration systems to make it suitable for the irrigation of home vegetable gardens.
Developing a local, land based cuisine
An offshoot of the Banjalung system would be the development of a local cuisine. This would be a geographically distinctive cuisine based on the indigenous and exotic fruits, nuts and vegetables produced in the region, according to Peter. It could be linked with various ethnic cooking styles to create a genuinely provincial cuisine.
Developing distinctive cuisine in Northern NSW would encourage the production of locally grown foods and, as it was developed, could prove an added attraction for visitors to the region.
The Solomons
Peter Hardwick’s Bandjalung Permaculture is a model for the humid subtropics. Perhaps it could be replicated with other species in other climates. I’m sure it could, because I have seen it.
When I worked in international development in the Solomon Islands, our agency supported village farmers on isolated islands like Lauru, the local name for the island known as Choiseul. I was at a village to document the project of a young village woman for a training booklet I was producing. She led me from the narrow, humid valley where she and her children lived in a cluster of palm leaf huts, into the foothills that arose behind. Here, interplanted with the natural forest, she and her son had established indigenous fruit trees as food and teak trees as a cash crop. It wasn’t possible to distinguish this cultivated forest from the natural forest because the cultivated copied the structure of the natural forest.
An agroforest system that could have been
We have the knowledge to create planting systems like this. Agroforestry — agricultural forestry — doesn’t necessarily interplant trees of direct value to people like food and building materials amid an existing, natural forest. It can be the planting of new forests with trees and shrubs all of which are of direct use to people but which mimics the three or so vertical layers of natural bushland.
It can also be the growing of non-edible utility species like building timbers and fuelwood. There was a good exemple of this being developed in NSW during the 1990s by Ecoforest, an investment project I did communications for that was started by permaculture financial activist, Damien Lynch, who earlier introduced social investment to permaculture. Mainly hardwoods were contour planted on hilly land and farm dams excavated for firefighting. Holiday shacks would have been built in the growing forest where investors could spend time out. The project was a little too early to attract sufficient investment and the land was eventually sold. Perhaps, it was speculated at the time, environmentalists preferred to keep their money in the banking system rather than invest in projects with ecological as well as financial benefit.
A vegetative dream
Peter’s Bundjalung Permaculture remains a vegetative dream, yet it is the dream of a new forest that spans landscapes and that provides for the creatures that dwell within it as well as others that have likewise emerged from nature — we humans.
More stories of the landscape in Permaculture Journal…
The big questions…
