- The Wildlife Forest Garden
- Posts
- Forest Garden News — Wild Flowers
Forest Garden News — Wild Flowers
Forest Garden News — Wild Flowers
Forest Garden Livestream
Wednesday 23rd September, 10am BST
Wild Flower Forest Garden
A forest garden is an edible ecosystem. To that end, grow native plants where possible as they have co-evolved with wildlife, providing food for the larval stages of insects which are the foundation of the food web.
This emphasis on nature is actually quite liberating. By thinking “what can eat my plants apart from me?”, you can relax about filling your garden with swathes of colour from native wild flowers. They will be eaten.
Wednesday's livestream will be part book reading from Benjamin Vogt’s A New Garden Ethic, part botanical exploration with Harrap’s Wild Flowers and part improv theatre. There is also a short Zoom meetup afterwards for anyone who’d like to come along. I was joking about the theatre.
Red Campion (Silene dioica) looking very pink
Livestream
Date: Wednesday 23rd September
Time: 10—10.30am
Livestream: twitch.tv/forestgardenwales
Zoom Q&A
Time: 10.30—11:00am
Zoom password: campion
More diversity
Forest gardens rely upon diversity to thrive, a hundred times more species than a traditional vegetable garden. And communities that support forest gardeners need diversity as well. This is why every month I make 10 free places on my forest garden course available to BAME people, students and the unwaged. Surprisingly, there have been some abusive comments and misinformation over in the Forest Garden UK Facebook group, which has meant a lot of fact-checking and legal research.
The silver lining to this dark cloud is that I am writing up my findings, so that anyone else who wants to engage in positive action will have some legal footing and statistics in case of any objections. I’m still waiting for stats from the RHS; if you can’t wait, the key part in the Equality Act 2010 is Part 11, Chapter 2, Section 158.
The only other garden podcast I listen to regularly apart from Roots and All is Tom Christopher’s Growing Greener. There is a marvellous episode with Larry Weaner, and it set my head spinning with thoughts like “Designing with nature”, “Reductive gardening”, “Scissor weeding FTW”, ”Nudge gardening”, “Show gardens vs. know gardens”. I loved it, definitely worth a listen.
I have a Patreon page!
A big thank you to the past students who encouraged me to set up a Patreon page, and thank you so much for those who have already become patrons.
The idea behind Patreon is that if you like what I do (livestreams, videos, courses, photo gallery), it makes it easy for you to give me small amounts of money.
I am also offering a monthly 1 hour one-to-one Zoom coaching session (that’s the Stellar Coaching Patron level). Longer term, I’d like to develop this idea, I think remote, short and frequent coaching is really viable for a forest garden.
