Forest Garden Wales

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Forest Garden Livestream

Wednesday 9th September, 10am BST

Approaching paths

Three mower width main thoroughfare in our Ornamental Forest Garden

I’ve increasingly come to appreciate the value of paths in a forest garden, not only as a way of accessing plants for harvesting and care but also as a way of defining different areas.

For smaller forest gardens, I’d recommend either wood chip paths, with a hardcore foundation if the ground is prone to moisture, or hard standing paths. For larger forest gardens, hard-wearing, pernicious grass usually makes the best ecological and economic sense.

When starting out with a large expanse of grass to be transformed into a forest garden, I’ll sketch out ideas for different areas, trees and plants. Once I have some kind of design in mind, my goto tools are short bamboo sticks and string. I like to keep things as lo-tech as appropriate! 

I’ll mark out the shapes with the string, and then mow paths through the long grass. The beauty of this approach is that you can try out different shapes and widths to see what works, all it takes is a bit of mowing. My three standard widths are single mower width for infrequent access paths, double mower for standard paths and triple mower for main thoroughfare!  (0.5m, 1m & 1.5m respectively)

This Wednesday 9th September, I’ll be talking about paths on the livestream at 10am British Summer Time. I’ll look at grass and wood chip, with tips on how to combat Grass Creep. Hope you can join me!

Livestream

• Time: 10—10.30am

• Livestream: twitch.com/forestgardenwales

Zoom Q&A

• Zoom link

• Time: 10.30—11:00am

• Zoom password: grass

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The direction of travel is wild

Still from Gardeners’ World, showing Sid Hill’s annual edible meadow

I must admit, I am 4 behind episodes behind with BBC Gardeners’ World. There’s just so much to be getting on with, watching telly is a bit of a luxury! In episode 21 from 7th August, there's a feature on Sid Hill from Cornwall (about 5 minutes 30 seconds). Ecological and edible gardens were mentioned but didn’t quite manage to say “forest garden”! He does mention it on his website though sidhillecogardens.com

It was great though to see more informal, edible, ecological and layered gardening. I saw that he was using Lychnis coronaria (Rose Campion) and Echinacea, repeated throughout the garden to create symmetry and visual effect. I would love for gardeners to do this with native flowers though. Repeated clumps of Red Campion and Greater Knapweed, anyone?

A small quibble, the direction of travel for gardening is natural and wild 🙂

The native challenge

I’m a $1 patreon of the Roots and All podcast, hosted by Sarah Wilson (fantastic podcast, give it a listen). There was a Zoom meetup for patreons and I was moaning about there not being one decent book about designing ornamental gardens with UK native plants. Not one! On Sarah’s suggestion, I contacted Sam Hunt, a garden designer from Cheltenham. Despite moving house, he very generously answered my questions (the answer is Molinia caerulea ssp. arundinacea, a tall UK native grass).

He also said, and I hope he doesn’t mind me quoting him here, “a natives-only planting palette would essentially be a conservation project”. He’s right, I can’t think of any UK native only gardens, not one. And what a challenge that is, the gauntlet has been thrown. In my opinion, native plants are an integral part of a forest garden, which is fair stuffed full of exotics. But a UK native only garden, now I’m tempted!

The Backyard Forest

I have finally finished editing the auto-generated captions for my online forest garden course. I’ve discovered some minor bloopers along the way but nothing too serious. My next job is to start creating the practical video walkthroughs. I think there’ll be about a dozen. I will also be uploading these free to my YouTube channel.

When I’ve finished, and tidied up all the bloopers, I’ll be increasing the price of the course from its currently reasonable £39.99. So, get it while it’s cheap hot!

To help redistribute privilege, every month I am offering 10 free places to BAME people, students & unwaged folk. Just send me an email to [email protected]. No need to explain your situation, no proof required, this is all done on trust.

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