A Forest Garden inspired by Robert Hart

From a letter to the Institute. The author refers to the 'Forest Garden' booklet by Robert Hart, about a multi-storey model garden of fruit and nut trees, vegetables and herbs (booklet available from the Institute for Social Inventions, 20 Heber Road, London NW2 6AA, for £3-25 incl. p&p).

In the autumn of 1990, I was fired by the idea of Robert Hart's Forest Garden, and so went to work for Sunseed, the tree-planting charity in Andalusia, to get some 'hands on' experience of putting trees in the ground. There, I did not plant a single tree but I learned to use a mattock, which has been crucial. My sons own an old country school and to the West of it is a twelth of an acre that the plough cannot reach, triangular, treeless and tilted towards the South. I asked the owner for it and he open-handedly gave it to me, on an exchange of letters.

Now the mattock came into its own, as I discovered a 90-year-old school rubbish tip and the foundations of the school stables. The tip has yielded about ten tons of stone and one ton of glass and iron, and the stable foundations will be a marvellous feature, when I can actually decide what to do with them.

I was pig-ignorant on fruit trees and so went to Brogdale in Kent and had my mind blown by the world's oldest, most comprehensive and best documented collection of fruit trees; and there learned the principles which, along with Robert Hart, now guide me.

Planting started in February '92, 65 yards of hedge to cut the wind and 19 fruit and nut trees. For the hedge, I chose alder for fast growth and nitrogen fixing, myrobalan the hedging plum, sloe to make sloe gin and quick thorn for encouraging the pollinating insects. And, ever a sucker for a weak joke, I planted them in the order: sloe, sloe, quick, quick, sloe. I planted the four plum trees to windward, then two crab-apples, next eight apples, two bullaces and two nuts to guard the back and a brown turkey fig against the wall, for luck. Except for this one, all the trees went into the same sized hole, 3'6" wide and 1'6" deep, filled with sand and gravel first, then muck and a backfill of the best of the earth, with peat, bone meal and hoof and horn meal. They all got a good muck mulch in May to stop them drying out and by the end of July, they looked very merry with bags of laterals. For principal ground cover, I had grown 100 clumps of welch onions and the same of Good King Henry and they were planted out and looking great. Salad and flavour herbs are nurseried in fifteen yards of brick-edged key beds on the West of the school garden wall. There is thirty yards of comfrey for the nitrogen.

In autumn '92, 19 currants went in, and every spare yard was planted with elder to cut the wind and I will mattock it out as soon as it intrudes.

I have to hasten because I have a nut thicket to plant for a neighbour's red squirrels and a Forest Garden to do for our primary school - when authority permits - which is the ideal site and will be of breath-taking loveliness, as it matures.

Immediately, I am working on a rain storage system of syphon-linked plastic juice butts - 1m base, 1.5m height - to pep up summer growth. I shall also get a Finnish Hackman juice extractor to turn gash fruit into drink, with the least work and mess.

So, three cheers for Robert Hart who did it, and showed us how.

And watch this space.

Ian Dodds, 1 Windsor Place, Off Correction House Lane, Alnwick, Northumberland NE66 1SU (tel 0665 604231).