Creating a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford Book Review

Creating a Forest Garden, subtitled Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops is an accessible guide to the extraordinary work of author Martin Crawford. Martin is Director of the Agroforestry Research Trust, ART, in Devon, England, and an acknowledged expert on temperate forest gardens.

What is a Forest Garden?

A forest garden is a highly efficient, low maintenance, human-designed productive woodland. Comprising many unusual trees, shrubs and ground level plants, an established forest garden is largely self-fertilizing, self-watering and easy to maintain. While agroforestry has been commonplace for many centuries in tropical and sub-tropical regions, the temperate forest garden has only been developed recently in the western world.

Creating a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford

Following Martin’s inspiring DVD A Forest Garden Year published in 2009, Creating a Forest Garden gives readers all the information they need to create their own multilayered garden of edible, and other useful plants, along with plenty of background on the many benefits of agroforestry.

Creating a Forest Garden is suitable for readers growing in small gardens or on much larger plots, including commercial growers. The book covers:

• How forest gardens work
• Designing the forest garden
• A comprehensive directory of over 500 trees, shrubs and ground level plants suitable for the forest garden.
• Detailed advice on paths, windbreaks, harvesting, maintenance, wildlife and pests.

Creating a Forest Garden covers an exciting range of useful crops including bamboo shoots, goji berries and yams alongside more familiar fruits such as apples and raspberries.

Agroforestry Research Trust

Martin Crawford has been working on his forest garden at the Agroforestry Research Trust for 15 years. The performance of the plants within the garden, including the many interrelationships between the species, has been the subject of Martin’s meticulous research.

Books on Forest Gardens

Creating a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford becomes the new definitive guide to temperate agroforestry.

Previous books on forest gardens include:

• Forest gardening by Robert Hart, The original groundbreaking book that inspired a generation of forest gardeners. While inspiring, it is now out of date and lacking detail.
• Edible Forest Gardens (2 volume set) by Dave Jacke (Chelsea Green, 2005) is very detailed, however it is far less accessible than Creating a Forest Garden.

Rob Hopkins, founder of Transition Town, Totnes, sums up the importance of Creating a Forest Garden in his foreward:

Once one has tasted of the potential of what Martin suggests in this book, one cannot look at food production in the same way again, I have nothing but the deepest gratitude for Martin’s work.

Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops by Martin Crawford is published by Greenbooks, UK, 2010. ISBN: 978 1 900322 62 1. Distributed by Chelsea Green in the USA.