 | A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject.(April 2017) |
Martin Crawford is a British author who is the founder and director of the Agroforestry Research Trust. [1] [2]
He runs regular tours of the 2-acre forest garden at Dartington in Devon as well as the Littlehempston site as well as courses in the design of Forest Gardens.
Gardening is the practice of growing and cultivating plants as part of horticulture. In gardens, ornamental plants are often grown for their flowers, foliage, or overall appearance; useful plants, such as root vegetables, leaf vegetables, fruits, and herbs, are grown for consumption, for use as dyes, or for medicinal or cosmetic use.
Permaculture is an approach to land management and philosophy that adopts arrangements observed in flourishing natural ecosystems. It includes a set of design principles derived using whole systems thinking. It uses these principles in fields such as regenerative agriculture, rewilding, and community resilience. Permaculture originally came from "permanent agriculture", but was later adjusted to mean "permanent culture", incorporating social aspects as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming. The term was coined by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in 1978, who formulated the concept in opposition to Western industrialized methods and in congruence with Indigenous or traditional knowledge.
Forest gardening is a low-maintenance, sustainable, plant-based food production and agroforestry system based on woodland ecosystems, incorporating fruit and nut trees, shrubs, herbs, vines and perennial vegetables which have yields directly useful to humans. Making use of companion planting, these can be intermixed to grow in a succession of layers to build a woodland habitat.
Robert Adrian de Jauralde Hart was an English pioneer of forest gardening in temperate zones. He created a model forest garden from a 0.12 acre (500 m²) orchard on his farm. He credits the inspiration for his work to an article by James Sholto Douglas, which was in turn inspired by the work of Toyohiko Kagawa.(page 41)
Dartington Hall in Dartington, near Totnes, Devon, England, is a country estate that is the headquarters of the Dartington Hall Trust, a charity whose mission is to be a creative catalyst for more just and sustainable ways of living, as a centre for learning in ecology, the arts and social justice. The estate itself dates from medieval times.
Longleat is an English stately home and the seat of the Marquesses of Bath. A leading and early example of the Elizabethan prodigy house, it is adjacent to the village of Horningsham and near the towns of Warminster and Westbury in Wiltshire and Frome in Somerset. It is noted for its Elizabethan country house, maze, landscaped parkland and safari park. The house is set in 1,000 acres (400 ha) of parkland landscaped by Capability Brown, with 4,000 acres (1,600 ha) of let farmland and 4,000 acres (1,600 ha) of woodland, which includes a Center Parcs holiday village. It was the first stately home to open to the public, and the Longleat estate includes the first safari park outside Africa.
Schumacher College is a college near Totnes, Devon, England which offers ecology-centred masters programmes, short courses and horticultural programmes. In addition to British and European students, it attracts a large volume of international students from countries such as Brazil, Japan and the USA.
Agroforestry is a land use management system in which trees or shrubs are grown around or among crops or pastureland. This diversification of the farming system initiates an agroecological succession, like that in natural ecosystems, and so starts a chain of events that enhance the functionality and sustainability of the farming system. Trees also produce a wide range of useful and marketable products from fruits/nuts, medicines, wood products, etc. This intentional combination of agriculture and forestry has multiple benefits, such as greatly enhanced yields from staple food crops, enhanced farmer livelihoods from income generation, increased biodiversity, improved soil structure and health, reduced erosion, and carbon sequestration. Agroforestry practices are highly beneficial in the tropics, especially in subsistence smallholdings in sub-Saharan Africa and have been found to be beneficial in Europe and the United States.
Garden Organic, formerly known as the Henry Doubleday Research Association (HDRA), is a UK organic growing charity dedicated to researching and promoting organic gardening, farming and food. The charity maintains the Heritage Seed Library to preserve vegetable seeds from heritage cultivars and make them available to growers.
Maurice Anthony Ash was an environmentalist, writer, farmer, and planner. He was chairman of the Town and Country Planning Association and of the Dartington Trust.
Social forestry is the management and protection of forests and afforestation of barren and deforested lands with the purpose of helping environmental, social and rural development. The term social forestry was first used in 1976 by The National Commission on Agriculture, when the government of India aimed to reduce pressure on forests by planting trees on all unused and fallow lands. It was intended as a democratic approach to forest conservation and usage, maximizing land utilization for multiple purposes.
Forest farming is the cultivation of high-value specialty crops under a forest canopy that is intentionally modified or maintained to provide shade levels and habitat that favor growth and enhance production levels. Forest farming encompasses a range of cultivated systems from introducing plants into the understory of a timber stand to modifying forest stands to enhance the marketability and sustainable production of existing plants.
Trees for the Future is a Maryland-based nonprofit organization founded on April 12, 1989, that helps communities around the world plant trees. Through seed distribution, agroforestry training, and in-country technical assistance, it has empowered rural groups to restore tree cover to their lands, protect the environment and help to preserve traditional livelihoods and cultures for generations.
The Agroforestry Research Trust (ART) is a British charitable incorporated organisation that researches temperate agroforestry and all aspects of plant cropping and uses, with a focus on tree, shrub and perennial crops. It produces several publications and a quarterly journal, and sells plants and seeds from its forest gardens.
Climate-friendly gardening is gardening in ways which reduce emissions of greenhouse gases from gardens and encourage the absorption of carbon dioxide by soils and plants in order to aid the reduction of global warming. To be a climate-friendly gardener means considering both what happens in a garden and the materials brought into it and the impact they have on land use and climate. It can also include garden features or activities in the garden that help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere.
Regenerative agriculture is a conservation and rehabilitation approach to food and farming systems. It focuses on topsoil regeneration, increasing biodiversity, improving the water cycle, enhancing ecosystem services, supporting biosequestration, increasing resilience to climate change, and strengthening the health and vitality of farm soil.
A community orchard is a collection of fruit trees shared by communities and growing in publicly accessible areas such as public greenspaces, parks, schools, churchyards, allotments or, in the US, abandoned lots. Such orchards are a shared resource and not managed for personal or business profit. Income may be generated to sustain the orchard as a charity, community interest company, or other non-profit structure. What they have in common is that they are cared for by a community of people.
Rubus tricolor is an evergreen prostrate shrub, native to southwestern China. Leaves are dark green above, pale green below, and stems have red bristles. It has white flowers in summer, and edible red fruit. It grows approximately 0.3 m (1 ft) high and usually forming a vigorously spreading, dense mat. In cultivation it is mainly used as groundcover. Common names include Chinese bramble, groundcover bramble, creeping bramble, Korean raspberry, Himalayan bramble, Groundcover Raspberry. In Chinese it is called 三色莓.
The National Agroforestry Policy of India is a comprehensive policy framework designed to improve agricultural livelihoods by maximizing agricultural productivity for mitigating climate change. The Government of India launched the policy in February 2014 during the World Congress on Agroforestry, held in Delhi. India became the first country in the world to adopt an agroforestry policy.
