A Straight-Shooting Forest Gardener
I web-searched my way into a permaculture design firm and cold-emailed them asking for referrals to farms where I could volunteer. I ended up grateful for a solid list, but what I hadn’t expected was for both business partners at the firm to invite me to their own homes.
After some back-and-forth with rain cancellations, the first of these visits took place this week. She didn’t even have me do any work for her, but kindly took over an hour of her time to show me around, tell her story, and answer my questions.
The idea behind a forest garden is to mix trees, shrubs, vines, ground cover, and other plants in close proximity, all of which provide benefit in one way or another. Many of these plants give food directly, such as persimmon trees, tea bushes, and chestnut trees. Other plants are good for birds and pollinators. Still others have symbiotic relationships with bacteria that take nitrogen from the air and convert it to a form plants can use, enriching the soil — these are called “nitrogen fixers.” (Clover is an example, I learned today, as are many legumes.) Sometimes annuals are mixed in — she had some tomatoes — but most of the plants she showed me were perennials.
I’ve only read about forest gardens in books, and the theory sounds complicated. You’re supposed to plant a fruit or nut tree, say, with certain types of smaller shrubs around it that aren’t too aggressive, further surrounded by nitrogen-fixers, flowers for pollinators, and so forth. Most complex of all is ensuring that each plant complements all other plants in the group. I’ve read intricate charts with various elaborate groupings of plants from seven possible categories, all of which depend further on climate, sunlight, and water availability.
The reality was refreshingly realistic. The gardener told me she goes to the store, buys plants, and clusters them together. She leaves paths between clumps so she can walk around. I asked her if she worried about the delicate theory I’d read about. She responded with a shrug: “If it doesn’t work, it’ll die.” She added the caveat that she has a lot of land to work with so she has the room to make mistakes, and of course if you buy a hundred-dollar plant you’ll want to treat it carefully. Nonetheless, she didn’t buy into micromanagement or over-analysis. She certainly knew what she was talking about, but simply couldn’t be bothered endlessly analyzing species lists ensuring that the resultant meticulous grouping achieved optimal productivity. “Nature doesn’t work that way,” she said. Of course she stuck to basic principles, but a gardener can’t afford to be slowed down too much by hyper-analysis, or nothing will ever get done.
Fall is the wrong season to take pictures of a forest garden, but I tried my best:
Since clover is such a great nitrogen-fixer, she’ll occasionally buy clover seeds and throw them around her property with no pattern in mind. She’ll dig holes in her yard, fill them with rich organic matter, and then cover them up again. All this to simply enhance the fertility of the soil generally, even if she doesn’t have plans to grow anything in that particular spot anytime soon.
Much more than analyzing individual plant pairings, she emphasized the importance of water and light. The first several minutes of her tour she talked about how the entire garden was designed to maximize sun. Since the best light comes from the south, the two-acre garden was planted in a U-shape, with the open part of the U pointed south. As we moved north or out to the east-west sides of the U, plants got taller, so the tallest trees were on the furthest east, west, and north edges of the property. If this description isn’t making sense, think about how tall people go to the back for a group photo, and you’ll have the right idea.
Water follows gravity, so she places moisture-loving plants in the lower parts of the yard. She described an unfortunate tilt in her property: the lowest part of the yard was the north, and it tilted up towards the south. Just like how a group photo is harder on a backwards-sloping hill, since the tall people have to go on tip-toe to compensate, her yard wasn’t optimally slanted, but she managed just fine around it.
She had a great sense of humor and didn’t beat around the bush. She spoke her mind unapologetically while remaining pleasant and kind. She poked holes in groupthink and cast doubt on bandwagon ideas. I didn’t think of sustainable gardening as subject to trends, but there are certain hallmark ideas that she says are oversold as being critical to any permaculture operation, which she thinks is silly (such as comfrey, which she still uses, albeit sparingly). As she spoke, I thought to myself that the same narrow-minded trend of holding too tightly to certain specifics as “right” can be true in dieting, parenting, art, or any number of other endeavors. I just hadn’t thought of it in farming before.
Even though I didn’t get my hands dirty on this trip, I learned a lot about gardening and perhaps a little about life. Her profound pragmatism and flexibility were evident in almost every sentence she spoke, standing in such happily stark contrast to my perfectionism that at several points in the conversation I couldn’t contain my chuckling at the sheer magnitude of our differences.
