Nature Works Wildlife food forest garden design

View this email in your browser

Intersectional Forest Gardening

The Dandelion clock in the banner photo is absolutely stunning (link to the original). It’s by Laulau Walker and for me, it sums up the special place that forest gardening holds in my heart 💚. The Dandelion is everywhere in the UK, yet it’s ubiquitous beauty is often overlooked, as are its many culinary applications and its massive support of invertebrates. 

The common Dandelion is beautiful, edible and supports wildlife. Plus it is easy to grow and low-maintenance (so long as you don’t want to get rid of it!). It really is the epitome of an intersectional forest garden plant.

I would love to see a series of “intersectional gardening” lectures/interviews because these traditionally separate disciplines cover vast swathes of knowledge — entomology, ecology, botany, water management, design etc.

This make wildlife and edible gardening so much more accessible to ‘traditional’ gardeners, who want to know how to create habitat and diversity to support wildlife in their gardens, but they just don’t know how. To be honest, in my garden design practise, I often struggle to keep all the plates spinning and link up what feels like disparate strands.

New classes

Many apologies for the absence of newsletters these past 3 months. I am standing as a “Climate Candidate” in the local council elections and I have been thinking deeply about what direction to take my wildlife food forest garden design business. 

I really, really enjoy running forest garden workshops and courses. One of the big issues I have found is the comparative ‘nicheness’ of forest gardening, so I want to make it easier to get started and also keep on going. 

To this end, rather than have a single 4 hour online course, I think it would be better to break it up into separate classes. I have a few ideas, please email anything you would like to see.  

The other key improvement I’d like to see is an overview of all the classes, so that you can get an idea of what your progress is, and what more you would like to learn.Thanks for reading!Jake

Greater Stichwort and Lesser Celandine. UK native wild flowers.

Forest garden plant of the moment

Nettle, makes a great soup. Photo by Maksym Kozlenko

Share

Forward