The Forest (or Woodland) Garden

This photo shows a scene from a woodland garden in the Pacific Northwest. Beyond the fence is a completely developed area, with nothing but pavement for miles around. Within the fence is a serene haven for humans and birds. The photo illustrates one of the key principles of woodland gardening, which is the use of vegetation at multiple levels rather than (as in a traditional flower garden) just near the ground. Douglas fir trees provide the top layer. The intermediate layer is occupied by a PNW native shrub called osoberry, and the ground layer is covered with a glossy-leaved native called Oregon grape.

FOREST OR PRAIRIE? Most gardeners are Prairie gardeners, in a sense. Because we like flowers, we tend to like sun. That in turn leads us to prefer gardens that are open and treeless, mimicking the conditions in the wide open Prairies of the Midwestern provinces and states. Many of the most popular garden plants--purple coneflower and black-eyed Susan to name just two--came to the garden from the Midwestern Prairies.

I grow Prairie plants myself, because in addition to being beautiful and hardy, they also attract pollinators. However, for the last 14 years of my gardening life (since leaving Illinois in 1993), I have lived outside of the Prairie States. First in the Seattle area and now in Nova Scotia, I have lived in areas that are naturally forested. And it has always seemed "just natural" to me that my gardens in these areas should be forested too. When the existing tree cover wasn't adequate, I've planted fast-growing trees and planted large shrubs in order to try to get a woodland effect, as I described in a post called "A Walk on the Shady Side".

I have come to prefer this style of gardening to the open style. You don't get as many brilliant flowers in shade, but woodland gardens are cool, quiet, and serene; they are great habitat for birds, and they are relatively easy to maintain. I've also come to appreciate the aesthetics of a shady garden: Because you can't lean on flashy flowers for effect, you have to pay a lot more attention to foliage, structure, and other subtle ways of creating beauty.

Until today, I never gave a lot of thought to where woodland gardening came from, however. So I was very pleased to read an article in today's Guardian that provided some background on this topic. Jill Tunstall writes in the British newspaper that this style of gardening "goes back to the Aztecs but was reinterpreted by the late Robert Hart, a visionary gardener who brought the idea to Britain in the 1960s and named it 'forest gardening'."

She says that Hart, who lived on the border between Shropshire and Wales, realized that forest gardens "were both productive and self-maintaining. He set about rearranging his own garden on forest principles with edible layers of self-sustaining perennials that would provide food, fuel and medicines, as well as support wildlife. His philosophy was recorded in two books, The Forest Garden and Beyond the Forest Garden (Green Books), both published shortly before he died in 2000."

Tunstall insterviews garden designer Jennifer Laurol, who emphasizes, quite correctly, that the key structural element of a woodland garden is layering--that is, the use of vegetation on mutiple levels. Books on natural design typically describe three layers, which roughly correspond to trees (top level), shrubs (intermediate level), and groundcovers (ground level). But apparently Robert Hart listed seven layers, from roots all the way up to the high canopy.

There does seem to be a key difference between the British forest garden and what designers here in North America are more likely to call a woodland garden. (See for example Rick Darke's book The American Woodland Garden: Capturing the Spirit of the Deciduous Forest, published in 2002.) Designers here tend to want to imitate the ecosystem that would occur naturally on a site, which requires using native plants or at least trying to. In contrast, British designers seem to be more interested in growing food than in imitating the local ecosystem. Hart seems to have emphasized that a forest garden is a more wildlife-friendly, low-maintenance way of growing food plants. I was quite surprised to learn that woodland gardens can be used to grow food plants, as a matter of fact. Although I remain committed to working with native plants, now I'm wondering whether a portion of the food garden couldn't be a lot shadier than I had previously planned.

One thing is certain: Even if you're not a native plant enthusiast, as I am, if you live in a naturally forested area the woodland or forest approach to design is more appropriate, better for wildlife, and easier to maintain.

Many thanks to the member of the Native Gardening group on Yahoo! Groups who tipped me off to the article in the Guardian.

Garden Planning vs. Plant Collecting

DO YOU BUY PLANTS WITHOUT KNOWING WHERE YOU'RE GOING TO PUT THEM? If so, welcome to my club: Like me, you're probably more of a plant collector than a garden planner.

Now the odd thing about my being a plant collector is that, when I talk to other people about gardening, I encourage them to be garden planners.

This is the standard advice given to gardeners: Take some time (preferably in the off-season), sit down with a map of your property (preferably to scale), and plan what you want to do where.

This is not only standard advice but also good advice, definitely the way to proceed if you want to use your money and time efficiently and avoid having to undo sudden inspirations that later turn out to have been mistakes. It also helps to ensure that you will have planting sites that are suitable for the plants you want to grow. And perhaps most important of all, this is a more natural approach to gardening. When you plan your garden, you are treating it as a plant community rather than as a collection of individual plants. This is how nature does it, too.

Make no mistake: This is a good thing to do. I encourage it. People have even paid me, on occasion, to create garden plans for them, for precisely this reason.

And yet when it comes to my own garden, I barely plan at all. I have a general idea of where I'm headed (e.g., "front yard = woodland garden"), and I do devote some time to figuring out where to put whatever trees I want to include in my design. But most other planting decisions are driven by what I purchase. And what I purchase is driven by a combination of what's available with the kind of have-to-have-it-right-now craving that is known only to the hardened collector. If you're a collector, you know what I talking about. If you're not, you'll never understand.

If you're a plant collector, you may also do what I end up doing: Namely, I buy plants because I have-to-have-them, even though I don't know where I'm going to put them. I see that Jane is selling a Dodecatheon, for example, and I buy it even though my forlorn front yard isn't ready for this woodland plant yet. The photo above shows Jane's Dodecatheon in a pot on my deck, which is the only spot I could think of for it, along with Jane's Erythronium and one of Jodi's Podophyllums. They'll live there, happily I hope, until my woodland garden is ready for them.

In the meantime, I consider myself lucky to be a native plant enthusiast. Limiting myself to native or "nearly native" plants helps to curb my appetite for plants, much as specializing in Wedgewood humidors might restrain the pottery enthusiast's purchases of expensive breakables.

Being a native plant fan also helps to create the illusion that I am a good garden planner. As long as I stick to natives and nearly-natives, and as long as I do eventually create good sites for them, the plants I'm buying so impulsively probably will be able to form a community. That's because so many of them probably were part of the same, or similar, communities in nature.

Nature can be very kind -- even to her plant collectors.

My Forlorn Front Yard 5 (Early Planting)

Native groundcovers are beginning to knit together in my front yard, which was planted two years ago. The photo shows one or more cinquefoils (Potentilla spp.) and a few wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana). All of these plants are attractive to pollinators; they will be covered in small white or yellow flowers later in the spring; the strawberries are edible, though tiny. The plants cost me nothing, as they grow wild in fields, on roadsides, and as "weeds" in lawns. Native Potentilla spp. and Fragaria spp. can be found in many parts of North America.

BARE SOIL IS AN INVITATION TO WEEDS. So as soon as I'd covered my front yard with mulch, as I described in "Improving Soil, Simply," my next step was to try to get native groundcovers established as quickly as possible.

Buying groundcovers in this quantity could be expensive, and we've already established that I'm cheap. Another problem is that my long-term goal for this area is to turn it into a woodland--that is, shady--garden. But at the moment the area is fairly sunny.

So what to do? Well, as always I try to work with nature, taking advantage of nature's bounty along the way.

First, I took a lesson from nature's book: What does nature do when confronted with bare soil?

Nature does not allow bare soil to stay bare. If allowed to do so, nature quickly introduces hardy plants that are able to tolerate the harsh conditions of a newly cleared site. These plants typically spread aggressively, and for that reason they are often regarded as weeds. Some of them deserve this designation, but some of them are actually quite valuable: They prevent erosion, and with time, they will create a litter of dead leaves and fallen bits of stem and wood; as these decompose, they will prepare the way for plants that require richer soil.

In areas such as the one I live in, which is naturally forested, these hardy plants will include not only groundcovers but also trees. As long as nobody cuts them down, eventually the trees will get big enough to create shade; as this happens, the sun-loving plants that initially colonized the site will slowly die out; as they disappear, nature will replace them with more shade-tolerant plants. This process, in which one group of plants (or plant community) is gradually replaced by another, is known to ecologists as natural succession. The hardy plants that are the first to colonize a bare site are known as early successional plants.

My goal for my front yard is eventually to turn it into a woodland, but for now I am taking my cue from nature and planting it with the hardy plants that nature would plant first: that is, with early successional plants. For candidates, I had to look no further than local roadsides, fields, and even my own lawn: These provided a nearly limitless supply of native plants that are adapted to rapid growth under harsh conditions, including not only cinquefoils (Potentilla spp.), wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana), blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium spp.), and violets (Viola spp.).

I have also planted the front yard with hardy trees that are adapted to full sun and poor soil, especially paper birch (Betula papyrifera), which I chose for its fast growth and beautiful white bark, and American mountain ash (Sorbus americana), which I chose for its small size and because the berries appeal to birds. Eventually these trees will create shade, and many of the groundcovers I've planted will begin to die from lack of sun. But by then they'll have done their job. I will bid them a fond (and I mean that) farewell, gradually replacing them with the shade-tolerant groundcovers that are characteristic of our native woodlands.