The garden of the future?

Imagine a garden that needs no weeding, watering, digging or feeding and can be left to look after itself for weeks, even months, on end. Go further: it's organic, wildlife-friendly, disease resistant, reduces your weekly food bill and brings fashionable foraging to your doorstep.

It might sound too good to be true, but this garden can be a reality for anyone with some outdoor space, whether it's the backyard of an inner-city terrace or the grounds of a country vicarage.


Just over a year ago Jennifer Lauruol's modest garden at her home on a new housing estate in Lancaster amounted to little more than a lawn that the previous owner's dog had been peeing on for the past four years. Others may have seen stained grass, but Lauruol's vision was to mimic a system of planting that 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".

Studying the woodlands and forest around his Wenlock Edge home on the Shropshire/Wales border, Hart realised that they 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.

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