Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops

I gave in to temptation and ordered the new Creating a Forest Garden book by Martin Crawford. I actually really like it, but it's definitely aimed not so much to the permie market but to the UK gardeners market. It's a nice bigish, glossyish book full of colour photos and lovely silky paper, obviously designed with christmas presents in mind, and I'm certain that pretty well *any* keen gardener in Britain would love to own it. And bearing that in mind, I think it's going to be highly effective in promoting the idea of forest gardening within the UK. The plants listed seem to be chosen mostly for warmer parts of UK and include things that I would never even have considered in Wales but discount things that need really hot summers, so it's not a perfect guide for me now I'm in Portugal even though the winter temperatures here aren't much different to the warmer bits of Britain. The book is very nicely written and presented, nothing too technical and not preachy in any way, just presenting the information you need to design and plant up a nice forest garden and make you feel nice and glowy inside because your new garden style is also 'green'. There were loads of native plants included, to the extent that reading it was a bit like taking a virtual tour back to the UK and I went all nostalgic remembering days spent collecting samples and seed from hedgerows and persuading them to grow in my old garden. I even managed to figure out a few which would also grow here, hopefully, so there's a few seeds on order now. I find it hard to read anything 'heavy' these days but this book was really easy and I read it cover to cover in one day and then went through all the plants again happily making lists and then hitting ebay for seed supplies. Is it the definitive book on forest gardening? Well, I could actually afford this one, just, wheras I never managed to scrape the money together for Edible Forest Gardens so I can't compare, but I suspect that it's going to be the definitive guide for the UK, and being a Brit myself, I can see that most Brits would believe that would also make it *the* definitive guide. We are a little insular after all.

This is an amazing resource for anyone starting a forest garden. The writing is clear, precise, yet enjoyable, packed with useful information on hundreds of obscure plants. I loved reading about how to plan the garden, planning the use of windbreaks, nitrogen fixers, dynamic accumulators and different slopes. It breaks things down in a very sensible way and makes it feel doable without concealing the challenges involved. Forest gardening as described here makes an interesting contrast to traditional permaculture methods and I would recommend reading about those separately. It might make sense to mix strategies from both depending on location and situation. Integrating livestock/pets can solve some troubling issues and save a lot of work, but there's no discussion of it in this book. Likewise there's no mention of strategies like hugelkultur, creating heat traps, ponds etc. which can really help with productivity and diversity. But this isn't a criticism - the book is fantastic, hugely informative in its focus and detail, and I find myself flipping through it obsessively every spare moment.

You can tell a book is good when no-one is selling it second hand because it's truly earned it's place on the bookshelf. I'd have loved a bargain but feel this was worth every penny bought new. I've barely even scratched the surface of the info in this book and it has already shot to top place amongst my gardening book collection. When I opened it I did a quick random look at various pages and every single one had something I either didn't know, had forgotten, or had on the computer but like to have on hand so I'm not perpetually looking at a computer screen for reference. It's a big book, at 384 pages it's an inch thick, which gives you a clue how much knowledge it has space for, including 100s of plant details to design and planning, grafting, soil and temperature information, site preparation, paths, maintenance and much much more. It's presented well and in a way that I can see will have me dipping in constantly as well as settling into for long reads in winter with a notebook to hand for planning inevitable garden changes and plant purchases, within 5 minutes I had already added several new plants to my Wishlist, and discovered new edible uses for ones I already had. The appendix section at the back provides convenient condensed table based overviews of; Propagagtion Tables, Trees/Shrubs for hedging/fencing, Plants to Attract Beneficial Insects & Bees, Edible Crops by Month of Use. I only have a smallish garden but there is so much great information here that size need not be a limit to the usefulness of this book as you can still learn how to work with the smaller shrubs and plants to create a lower canopied mini forest garden. I can already tell this is a book I'll treasure for years.

This is a great book. Forest Gardening is planting a garden with things to eat, not necessarily annual vegetables, but fruit, vegetables, nuts, herbs, anything edible. Surely the garden of the future. In spite of the title, you don't have to own a forest to do it! Even a small garden will do. This book is very comprehensive in the how, why and when. I only downgraded it to 4 stars because a number of the full colour plates were misprinted in an all over green. Amazon kindly replaced my first copy immediately when I reported it, but the second one was the same; I kept it anyway. These misprints in no way affect the utility of the product. Go for it!

Ein wirklich gutes Buch, das nicht nur viele Tabellen mit Pflanzen enthält (Standort, Nutzung, etc.), sondern vor allem eine ganz neue - arbeitssparende, umweltfreundlichere, klimaangepasstere - Gartengestaltung vorstellt. Es werden zum Beispiel Pflanzen gezeigt, die zumindest ich noch nicht kannte, die gute Früchte haben und gleichzeitig andere Pflanzen düngen. Dazu gibt es Tipps zum Design in puncto Baumhöhe, Sonne, Wasser... Ein super Buch und nur zu empfehlen. Die englischen und lateinischen Pflanzennamen sind übrigens mit dem Handy mühelos zu übersetzen. Allerdings: Man sollte alle Pflanzen per Internet gegenchecken. Manche sind invasiv, andere schmecken wohl eher nicht so toll wie versprochen. Mein Hauptfeind ist die indische Scheinerdbeere. Das geht gar nicht.... Aber trotzdem ein super Ansatz

It's a big book. Half of it is devoted to describing how to design each layer in a forest garden, the other half is a very detailed plant catalog. I enjoy reading it and referring to it over and over.

Very informative.

Martin Crawford is a giant and his book is a must-read before starting a forest garden. His practical notions and tips will save you a lot of money and waste of time. A little bit expensive, but the book is worth the money.

Excellent livre (en anglais), c'est l'Encyclopédie en la matière, incroyablement complet. Les noms latins, cités systématiquement, rendent le livre accessible à des français anglophones. Seul la qualité de la reliure laissé un peu à désirer, les pages s'effondrent déjà par rapport à la couverture.