Designing a forest garden

A well designed forest garden  can be a productive and important part of a Permaculture, or low-impact living system,providing food or other useful products in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way.

Forest garden diagram by Graham Burnett - CC BY-SA 3.0

A young natural forest is a highly productive and self-sustaining eco-system so in forest garden design the essential principle are to reproduce those attributes for human benefit. Although a natural wild forest may look tangled and the trees placed randomly and haphazardly there is an inherent structure that helps to give it such great productivity.  Because different species of trees and plants grow to different heights a natural vertical structure to the forest evolves.

In forest garden design this is known as ‘layering’ and sometimes these layers are referred to as  ‘storeys’ or ‘stacks.’ This layering can often be seen best at the edges of forests where the height of the trees, shrubs, grasses and other plants diminish in size.  Read more