Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

Who invented permaculture? A lot of people. This man didn't seek publicity;
he just did it.
paul tradingpost@lobo.net
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Forest garden permaculture: Robert Hart in 1970's England
http://www.permaculture.co.uk/info/News/RHart.html

"His evidence that any sized garden could use the principle of stacking
perennial plants to create multi-dimensional food forests has been and
still is one of the most useful gifts to sustainability anyone could have
made."

Robert Hart died peacefully on the 7th March 2000 at a nursing home in
Church Stretton, Shropshire. It was not a great surprise as I knew he had
been ailing over the last few years, but I am sad that this remarkable
visionary is lost to us.

I first became aware of his powerful contribution as an action researcher
in the field of sustainability in 1985 when I picked up his joint work with
Sholto-Douglas on Forest Farming (1973). This was my introduction to the
notion of perennial agriculture in general and agroforestry in particular.
My imagination was inspired (and still is) by the foresightedness and the
practicality of their work and my own visions filled with images of
abundant, dynamic and lifefull landscapes, worldwide, carpeted with verdant
forests.

Later in that year I attended my first permaculture design course (PDC) in
France. Now, far more inspired, I returned to England ready to forward the
work of sustainable development as best I could. A significant
disappointment to me was that all the case study material presented on the
PDC was drawn from the US, Asia, Africa and France. As far as I was aware I
was returning home to a permacultural desert. England and the rest of the
British Isles were part of the problem it seemed and not part of the
solution.

Imagine then my joy and delight when I discovered that, on a permaculture
pilgrims progress around England on my bike in the spring of 1986, Robert
Hart not only lived in Shropshire but had installed his radical, world
changing version of agroforestry in his back yard in Wenlock Edge, Church
Stretton.

I pedalled there immediately and spent three instructive and happy hours,
generously and patiently guided by Robert, in his now famous Forest Garden.
Seeing his work, his theory in action there on the ground made it so much
easier for me, as a novice, to dare to take up the daunting task of
teaching permaculture here. So, in a very real way, Robert was a mentor and
support person who enabled much of the current expansion of permaculture in
Britain today.

Amongst the many learnings Robert offered on that day, two in particular
stood out for me. One was his commitment to converting the large scale
concept of agroforestry practice into a form appropriate to any and
everyone’s garden in Britain. His original Forest Garden (the first of
many international peace forests he envisaged) occupies an eighth of an
acre and, as he pointed out, even that is quite large. His evidence that
any sized garden could use the principle of stacking perennial plants to
create multi-dimensional food forests has been and still is one of the most
useful gifts to sustainability anyone could have made.

The other equally powerful learning Robert embodied, as he chatted
animatedly amongst the fruit trees, was just how much one person can do to
move things forward when they give themselves permission to work their
visions out of the realms of thought and practice. This remains a core
inspiration to me and is, I believe, an essence of permaculture.

In 1987 Robert published (with Nicholas Albery’s Institute for Social
Inventions) details of his experiments in a slim manual entitled The Forest
Garden. This became a best-seller for Ecologic Books for several years and
so the spread of the Forest Garden concept commenced.

In the following years many learners of permaculture have visited the
Forest Garden at Church Stretton either on their own pilgrimages or with
design courses from all over Britain. Robert enjoyed the visits very much
for the most part, although in later years there was some danger that we
would overwhelm him. Happily, a number of our people volunteered from time
to time to help maintain and develop his several projects. For, although I
have mentioned his original Forest Garden, there was much more to see and
experience there on the Wenlock Edge, including his arboretum, the fruiting
hedge, the withy plantation, a German mound, a novel irrigation system, the
hut with wind charger and Robert’s thought provoking collection of edible
herbs, sallet plants and fruiting bushes and trees.

One of my abiding delights as a leader on some of these visits was to watch
a group of fifteen to twenty people disperse around the Forest Garden in
full leaf. In 20 minutes almost no-one would be visible and the only
evidence that this little patch was densely occupied was the steady hum of
obscured voices. If ever we want to know how a densely populated country
can seem cosily private we have the answer to hand – cover it with food
forests.

I have one regret. Robert, a generous and spiritual man who yearned for a
Gandhian based community, lived a somewhat dusty and isolated lifestyle and
experienced the stress and pressure of being the primary carer for his
disabled brother for many years. Whilst we did make a big difference to his
isolation by seeking out his wisdom and visiting him to see the Garden, we
never did find a practical solution to adequately surrounding him with
support in his old age.

I think of Robert time and again as I breakfast on summers days on
loganberries, blackcurrants, alpine strawberries and cherries harvested
from my forest garden in my tiny back yard in Oxford. Robert lives on in
hundreds (and perhaps thousands) of temperate forest gardens that have
since sprung up all over the world because of the years of his thoughtful
and visionary work. Robert enriched the planet for sure and that is no mean
feat.

Andy Langford

Andy Langford, is a Trustee of the Permaculture Association (Britain) and
Principal of the Permaculture Academy.