Robert Adrian de Jauralde Hart
Robert Adrian de Jauralde Hart (1913-2000) 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. Hart began with a smallholding called Highwood Hill farm at Wenlock Edge. His intention was to provide a healthy and therapeutic environment for himself and his brother Lacon, who was born with severe learning disabilities.
Hart adopted a vegan, 90% raw food diet. The three main products from a forest garden are fruit, nuts and green leafy vegetables. Hart’s forest garden at Wenlock Edge was a vegan organic food production system. He also began to examine the interactions and relationships that take place between plants in natural systems, particularly in woodland, the climax ecosystem of a cool temperate region such as the British Isles. This led him to evolve the agroforestry concept of the “Forest Garden”: Based on the observation that the natural forest can be divided into distinct layers or ‘storeys’, he developed an existing small orchard of apples and pears into an edible landscape consisting of seven dimensions: canopy, low-tree layer, shrub layer, herbaceous layer, ground cover, rhizosphere/underground, and vertical layer.
His evidence that any sized garden could use the principle of stacking perennial plants to create multi-dimensional food forests has been and still is one of the most useful gifts to sustainability anyone could have made. The other equally powerful learning Robert embodied, as he chatted animatedly amongst the fruit trees, was just how much one person can do to move things forward when they give themselves permission to work their visions out of the realms of thought and practice.
“No epicure dish served at the most expensive restaurant can compare with fresh fruit, organically grown without chemicals, picked from one’s own garden.”
Location: Shropshire, England
Organization: 1) Highwood Hill Farm, Wenlock Edge
2) Plants for a Future (PFAF.org)
Books: The Forest Garden, Forest Gardening Green Books, Beyond the Forest Garden The Inviolable Hills, Ecosociety, Forest Farming, Plants for Your Food Forest (PFAF)
Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vkH-vBVqYw
Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBQCKK4sLhg
