Forest Garden

What is a Forest garden?

Forest gardens are sustainable, edible landscapes designed to work like the natural structure of forests with their tree, shrub and herb associations. These are some examples of what a forest garden can be made of: fruit and nut trees (plum, apple, pear, almond, hazel) fruit bushes (currants, worcester berries, raspberries and loganberries) herbs (rosemary, sage. lavender, mint, and borage ) Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers to build a woodland habitat. Community Forest gardening is about people and their communities , learning and working with nature not against it to fulfill their diverse needs. Forest gardens can be planted in back gardens, school grounds, public space. They have the potential to contribute enormously to the social, physical, spiritual, economic and environmental well being of communities. 

Forest gardening is a prehistoric method of securing food in tropical areas. It was in the 1980s that Robert Hart coined the term “forest gardening” after adapting the principles and applying them to temperate climates.

The Forest Garden, Parc Teifi Cardigan.

We created and successfully ran a community forest garden near Cardigan for ten years which came to an end in 2017. During the 10 years many hundreds of children and volunteers were involved by: working, planting, picking, learning and playing in the garden. The old land was bought by a new land lord and unfortunately came to an end.

We began to look around for a new site and saw the land at Parc Teifi. We made contact with the Welsh Government and they were impressed with our work and achievements over the last 30 years with communities in London and in the last 15 years in West Wales.

Much of the work was achieved through a huge volunteer commitment and funded primarily through the Eco Shop and kind donations from local businesses in Cardigan. After writing a proposal for a community asset transfer in June 2017, we were given the keys to the new site at Parc Teifi in February 2019. In order to receive the land we put in place a community interest company CIC. This is a community benefit company that will keep the land secure indefinitely for the benefit of the community and environment. We felt it was time to invest in a project that would have a safe and secure future.