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Posts from Forest Garden Wales Blog for 11/10/2019
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Nov 09, 2019 10:47 am
A forest garden is a niche that falls between “traditional” gardening disciplines
In my previous life as web designer, I attended the leftfield tech conference dConstruct back in 2012. Recently, in a random email search moment, I came across a quote from James Burke:
“The unexplored no-man’s-land between disciplines”
And I thought, a forest garden is very much an in-betweeny discipline, an intersectional discipline if you will. Almost Frankensteinian as it’s part vegetable, part wildlife, part ornamental garden. The focus is on creating edible crops; working with nature to encourage wildlife is an intrinsic part, as the garden provides its own nutrients, mulch and pest control; the ornamental aspect because it’s a garden to spend time in.
I also thought, I’m getting a clearer idea of my calling. Reading ‘A New Garden Ethic’ by Benjamin Vogt has reinforced the importance of native plants and creating resilient ecosystems in a time of climate and extinction emergency. And it all fits together: the forest garden is the ideal place to promote and integrate native plants into our gardens, as it relies so heavily on a healthy ecosystem for its own functioning.
My project for 2020 is to properly explore native plant design and create a native plant design online course. And this is immensely exciting 😀
By [email protected] (Jake Rayson) on Nov 08, 2019 09:38 pm
Do you know how many bugs the Common Oak supports? This screenshot from the ‘Database of Insects and their Food Plants’ took my breath away
The Database of Insects and their Food Plants is a fantastic resource created by the Biological Records Centre that lists native plants and which inverterbrates they are hosts for.
The reason to use native plants in a garden is because they have co-evolved with local fauna and so are better for wildlife. To illustrate this, the Common Oak is host to 274 species of inverterbrate. That is a huge number. Here is a screenshot of the list (rotated to fit it on the page):
This is the reason we should be using native plants in our gardens wherever possible, because we need to start thinking about species other than ourselves. In a time of Climate Emergency and Mass Extinction, by providing habitat and food for our native wildlife, we increase its resilience. It also extends our thoughts beyond the confines of our gardens and into the wider landscape.
