Why Forest Gardens, Part 1
It is a well worn-cliché to say that having children will tend to change, or at least modify, your outlook on life, even reshape your politics and your commitments, your sense of what is valuable, and what isn’t. I am father to two children, ages five and six and a half, and I can say with the hindsight of experience that there is definitely truth to those sorts of ideas: when you become deeply invested in the life and wellbeing of a small human, your sense of time-frames, your long-term goals, and other things will most likely change in some way. What kind of world will my children inherit? What kind of world will their children inherit? These kinds of questions can become potentially debilitating, as with any unwise obsession with future events and future configurations of a world in which nothing is truly predictable or pre-determined. But that feeling of concern for the future world one’s children will inhabit can be turned to good and productive ends. On the one hand, as parents (and, we ought to hope and strive for, as wider communities invested with care and attention towards generations both young and yet to come) we can work to instill the values and skills in our children that will serve them well in the years to come—with the realization that we cannot predict or foresee exactly what those years will bring. We can also work, both on a personal and on a collective, collaborative scale, to actively build and to invest in the present world in ways that will benefit generations to come, our own and those of others. This sort of thought for the future, not that of ourselves but that of others, many of whom we will never meet, does not necessarily come easily. “Investing for the future” tends, in our world, to mean building up financial resources, usually set aside for the benefit of our children or other relatives. But what I have in mind—and the tie-in to food forests (also known as “forest gardens,” terms I’ll use interchangeably here)—is a different sort of investing, a different sort of building for the future.
Trees are almost by their very nature future- and other-oriented organisms. Nut and fruit bearing trees will often produce in great prodigious amounts, supplying bounty to a vast number of organisms; keystone species such as the oaks of temperate lands are biological powerhouses, feeding a mind-boggling array of organisms through their leaves, stems, nuts, roots, and even in their death and decay. Humans an benefit from such bounty, and a forest garden is designed primarily, though not exclusively, with human consumers in mind. But given both the prodigious nature of their bounty and the time horizons involved—trees do not grow to maturity overnight, and many can take years, even decades, before they start bearing—it makes very little sense to plant trees and have only one’s self in mind. Trees are an investment in our children and in our children’s children, in the worlds that are to come and which we ourselves may well never experience, but which we can actively shape through our work and intentions now. The work of making and tending the forest garden isn’t just one of planting certain trees, but also of tending and directing specific sorts of ecosystems, of productive webs of life that reach out to other places and other people and other organisms, ultimately having a bearing—however small, however seemingly insignificant in itself taken alone—upon the entire earth, upon our shared biosphere.
“The Grafter,” taken by Peter Henry Emerson in 1887, depicting an elderly man instructing a girl in the art of grafting, passing the knowledge of fruit tree growing down to another generation
To plant a forest garden is to make a deep and serious commitment to others—to our own children, if we have them, but also to the children of others, to those who will pass by in the years to come, and to the wider ecosystems we all inhabit and upon which we depend for our biological (and social and psychological and…) sustenance. Whether undertaken within the space of our own homes’ local environments—the thin strip beside a house or a vast sprawling forest—or in a public, community context, it is a sort of gift-giving, on behalf of many others. That interconnectivity, the sense of dependence and of constant flow of things and words and emotions, of the basic stuff of human life, is another thing that, I have found, really comes into relief in parenthood. We are not lonely autonomous beings, but dependent, intermeshed ones; our children depend on us, and, in a way, we come to depend on them. My flourishing is part of your flourishing, and vice versa. The food forest both models those kinds of connections and dependencies and also speaks to them, offering goods that are not restricted to a single individual or to a single generation, but in fact look out to other people and to other generations.
It is worth noting—and future posts will explore this in more detail—that the challenges of the forest garden, community or individual, are also contained within the issue of time-frame of involving others. We must also work to ensure that trees continue to flourish, that pocket ecosystem of the forest garden is managed and continues to thrive, and that even more quotidian things like land access and resource use continue. The forest garden is a gift that keeps giving, yes, but also one that requires a sort of continual '“giving,” and which must be handed off in time to others to continue the work of the gift.
