By Paul Scriven, Head Gardener at Careys Secret Garden 

Discover just what a Food forest is and how to grow your own with our Head Gardener Paul Scriven's deep dive into our Food Forest at Careys Secret Garden.

For those of you who may not be entirely familiar with the term food forest the basic idea is to create a diverse planting of edible plants that attempt to mimic natural ecosystems. Many Indigenous cultures have been using this technique for millennia to provide food, medicines and building materials so it makes sense to adapt this for the UK climate. It contains different layers of growing, larger tree (canopy), smaller trees (understorey) and large shrubs, vines and smaller shrubs and suckering plants, ground covering plants and even some tubers.

The idea is that these plants then work together providing an ideal habitat in which they can thrive maximising their potential to produce food, food not only for our consumption but also a prefect environment for wildlife to thrive.

Our 1 acre food forest is in the SW corner of the garden primarily because there were two mature trees (a walnut and a mulberry) that remain from the original garden that was planted in the late nineteenth century.

Our food forest, which we planted in 2022, is broadly made up as follows ;
Two wide borders, one planted with mature fruiting trees and shrubs including elders, cherry plums, hawthorn, sea buckthorn crab-apple and quince. On the opposite side our ‘nuttery’ as we like to call it is home to several different cob nut and filbert cultivars interspersed with medlar and Szechuan peppers trees.

Between these two ‘taller’ borders we have a well divided central areas where we have planted a range of apple pear and plum on dwarf rootstock so restricting their height to 2-2.5m . These trees have been interplanted with soft fruit - raspberries, jostaberries, gooseberries, currants - and then underplanted with ground covering options such as strawberries, and the prolific Chinese bramble.

Other beds of note are our acid patch which is home to our blueberries and cranberries and kept regularly mulched with pine needles that maintain a low soil pH.

Our comfrey corner home to a sterile hybrid known as Bocking 14 which provides us with 3-4 harvest of stems and leaves over the year that we sweat down to produce our concentrated liquid feed.

A recent and exciting addition to our food forest has been our wildlife pond and
adjoining bog garden. This spring we will be planting the areas with a wide variety of wildlife friendly plants and shrubs including many surprising and unusual edible subjects such as wasabi, duck potato taro, water pepper and ostrich fern. Hopefully by midsummer the whole area will be alive with wildlife and become a particularly diverse part of the garden.

Also in development is our mushroom corner which is sited in the shady corner of
the food forest. Our plans here are to incorporate the magic of mycelium and edible mushrooms. There has been much excitement about the power of fungi in our gardens and woodlands in recent years and, inspired by our Secret Fungi Festival in the autumn, we hope to encourage people to care for mushrooms within their gardens just as we would any other element. So far we have plans to have mushroom logs, inoculated mushroom pathways and are even promised our very own ‘Carey Oyster Mushroom’, grown by Jurassic Coast Mushrooms from a specimen found on the wider Carey estate… delicious!

Plant your own Food Forest

As Head Gardener at Carey I am often asked which are my favourite plants. In terms of plants for the food forest I would say certainly the following three:

Elders

Elderflower is by far a favourite of mine for making drinks. The berries are then great also for culinary use. Great choice of cultivars now available so for smaller garden and they are outstanding for wildlife,

Pepper tree (Zanthoxylum)

Some of our young Szechuan’s flowered for the first time last year and actually produced some of the pinkish-red aromatic fruits that contain the black seed. The leaves (which turn golden in the autumn) also emit a heady smell of citrus and spice. The plant is also very architectural.

Chilean guava

A fabulous plant that no garden with free draining soil should be without! Small, evergreen shrub with myrtle like leaves that in spring is smothered in white flowers. By late September, these have developed into the sweetest ruby coloured berries. They were reported to be Queen Victoria's favourite fruit and its easy to see why.

Shopping for your own Food Forest plants? Take a look at our Online Shop where you'll find lots of inspiration.