Robert Hart's Forest Garden,
Wenlock Edge, Shropshire.

This is probably the best example so far of an intensive Permaculture garden/orchard in Britain.

After thirty years of study, research and practical experience in Agroforestry and Forest Farming, Robert Hart set up an eighth acre model forest garden on his farm on Wenlock Edge. It is a miniature reproduction of the self-maintaining ecosystem of the natural forest. Consisting of over a hundred different species and varieties of fruit and nut trees, fruit bushes and climbers, perennial, self seeding and root vegetables. culinary and medicinal herbs, growing in the intensive conditions of the natural forest. Like the natural forest, it is a multi-storey, self regulating ecosystem that requires minimal maintenance.

The storeys comprise tall fruit trees, constituting the "canopy", nut trees and fruit trees on dwarfing rootstocks, constituting the "low tree layer", currant and gooseberry bushes, constituting the "shrub layer", vegetables and herbs, constituting the "herbaceous layer", dewberries and creeping herbs constituting the "ground cover layer", root vegetables, occupying the "rhizosphere", the root layer, and climbing berries and vines, constituting the "vertical layer".

The system is self-perpetuating, because almost all of the plants are perennial or active self-seeders; self-fertilising, because deep rooting trees, bushes and herbs draw upon minerals in the subsoil and make them available to their neighbours, and because the system includes edible legumes which inject nitrogen into the soil and mineral rich plants such as Buckwheat which inject calcium; self-watering, because deep-rooting plants tap the spring-veins in the subsoil, even at times of drought, and pump up water for the benefit of the whole system; self-mulching and self-weed-suppressing, because rapidly spreading herbs, such as Mint and Balm, soon cover all the ground between the trees and bushes and this creates a permanent "living-mulch"; self-pollinating, because the trees are carefully selected to be mutually compatible or self-fertile, and because the flowering herbs attract pollinating insects; self healing, because the scheme includes a number of aromatic herbs, which undoubtedly deter pests and disease and exhale healing radiation's; resistant to pests and disease, because of the aromatic plants, and also any complex comprising a wide spectrum of different plants does not allow the build up of epidemics such as affect monoculturea.