Why Grow Like a Woodland?

Walk into any established British wood and you will see a system that has been feeding itself for centuries. There is a high canopy of trees, a middle layer of shrubs, a soft scramble of herbs and a carpet of ground cover holding the soil together. Nothing needs digging, watering or feeding. Everything has found its place.

A forest garden borrows that same structure and swaps the wild species for productive ones. Instead of an ash and a hawthorn, you plant an apple and a blackcurrant. Instead of dog's mercury, you grow wild garlic and sweet cicely. The result is a plot that yields fruit, herbs, salads and berries for years with far less work than a conventional allotment, because the plants are doing the mulching, shading and soil-building for one another.

The good news for anyone with a modest garden, a paved corner or a strip beside a shed is that a forest garden scales down beautifully. You do not need an acre. You need about four square metres to make a start.

The Seven Layers, Simplified

Classic forest gardening describes seven layers, but on a small plot you can work with four or five and still get the effect.

• Canopy: a fruit tree or two. On a small plot choose a dwarfing rootstock such as M27 or M9 for apples, or a self-fertile plum like 'Victoria' on Pixy.
• Shrub layer: currants, gooseberries, jostaberries, blueberries in ericaceous compost, and dwarf hazel.
• Herbaceous layer: perennial vegetables and herbs — rhubarb, sorrel, lovage, mint in a sunken pot, chives, fennel.
• Ground cover: strawberries, wild garlic, creeping thyme, alpine strawberries, lungwort.
• Root and climber layers: Jerusalem artichokes, skirret, plus a climbing bean or grape up the tree.

You are aiming for a mosaic, not neat rows. Each plant should be close enough to shade the soil but far enough to get its share of light and water.

Planning a Plot the Size of a Parking Space

Take a piece of graph paper and mark north. In Britain, the sun tracks across the south, so put your tallest element — usually the fruit tree — on the northern or eastern edge, where its shadow falls away from the rest of the plot. If you have a fence or wall, use it: trained apples, pears and cherries along a south-facing wall give you canopy without eating ground space.

Next, think about access. A forest garden is dense, so leave a narrow path or two stepping stones so you can actually reach the fruit. A rough guideline is to plant the canopy about three metres apart, shrubs at one and a half metres, and herbs and ground cover wherever there is bare earth.

Finally, check your soil and light. Most of these plants want a reasonably fertile, free-draining loam and at least half a day of sun. If your plot is shady, lean on currants, rhubarb, sorrel and wild garlic, which all tolerate dappled conditions cheerfully.

Planting in the Right Order

Start with the soil, not the plants. Clear perennial weeds such as couch grass and bindweed before you begin, because once the layers close over you will struggle to remove them. Then spread a generous layer of well-rotted compost or leaf mould across the whole area and let the worms work it in.

Plant your trees and shrubs in autumn or early winter, while the ground is still warm and roots can settle before the cold. Water them in well, stake the trees, and mulch with bark or straw, keeping the mulch clear of the trunks.

Then fill the gaps. In the first two years, before the shrubs knit together, sow or plant quick annuals — salad leaves, radishes, calendula, nasturtiums — to cover bare soil and suppress weeds. They will be squeezed out naturally as the perennials take over, which is exactly what you want.

Keeping It Low-Maintenance

The whole point of a forest garden is that it looks after itself, but a little attention in the early years pays off handsomely.

• Mulch every autumn with two to three inches of compost or leaf mould. This feeds the soil and cuts watering to almost nothing.
• Chop and drop. Cut comfrey, borage or nettles two or three times a season and leave the leaves on the ground as free fertiliser.
• Prune lightly. Keep the centre of the plot open enough for light to reach the herbs. Remove dead or crossing branches in winter.
• Water only in the first summer and during genuine drought. After that, the shading and mulching do the work.
• Let some things flower. Leave a few plants to go to seed — the pollinators and predatory insects you attract will keep pests in check.

Expect the plot to look scruffy in its second year as everything jostles for space. Resist the urge to tidy too hard. By year three or four, the layers will have sorted themselves out and you will be picking raspberries, sorrel and apples from a garden that asks for an afternoon of your time each season.

What to Harvest and When

A well-laid-out forest garden gives you something nearly every month. Spring brings wild garlic, sorrel and the first rhubarb. Early summer offers strawberries, currants and gooseberries. Late summer and autumn are for apples, plums, blackberries and Jerusalem artichokes, with herbs such as thyme and sage cropping right through the year.

Start small, plant densely, mulch thickly, and let the woodland do what it has always done. You will end up with less digging, fewer weeds and far more food than you expected from a patch you once thought was too small.