The word “food” can mean many things. A grocery store with shelves lined with fresh, vibrant produce. Sitting down to eat with family. A full to bursting vegetable garden in the August heat.
Takeout from a drive-thru on the way to a meeting.
A flower opening at dawn.
Cans of food from a local food bank.
The waving grasses of a marsh.
A rotten log. A forest.
It’s been in the back of my mind to learn more about Food Forests and permaculture throughout my entire career. I grew up keeping a traditional vegetable garden. One with a quick rotation of spring, summer and fall crops, perennial veggies like rhubarb and asparagus, and herbs that I would do my best to cover to keep alive for next year.
Then, when I travelled to South America in 2008, I had an opportunity to learn more about permaculture in action. You can read more about that here. That perspective changed the way I looked at the connection between a managed vegetable garden and a wild landscape. Maybe the two didn’t need to be as separate as they seemed.
That’s what I had in mind when I was looking at the spot we call the Children’s Play Area behind Lucille’s Garden. On one side is the compost bin, the neat fence-line, and the carefully maintained vegetable garden beds. In any given season, those beds will change crops two to three times, between the first flush of green in the spring and the last cold hardy crops in the fall.
It’s an ephemeral landscape, which is fun in its own way. Visitors often tell me, “I come every week and it always looks different!”
On the other side of the Children’s Play Area is the Native Woodland Walk, which is one of my favorite gardens at Tyler. Every time I walk through that garden I see the beauty of the Pennsylvania forest. The towering tulip poplars and spreading oaks, columbine and trillium in the spring. All of the plants that remind me why I feel connected to this corner of the state.
I wanted to see how I could create something that bridged those two landscapes, while still creating a fun and engaging space for visitors young and old. And because my solution to most problems is just “add more plants,” I started to play around with the idea of introducing permaculture crops.
The beginnings of the story were already there, in the pawpaw trees (Asimina triloba) that grew just at the top of the hill. There were also mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum) tucked in the shade of the magnolia. There were low boggy places in the landscape, and high dry areas too. All the things a landscape needs to become a rich and productive Food Forest.
The first thing I always do when I think about restructuring a landscape is to look at what’s working. There were some beautiful winterberry hollies (Ilex verticillata) growing in the basin, a nice redbud (Cercis canadensis) and enough cup plant (Silphium perfoliatum) and joe-pye weed (Eutrochium purpureum) to feed an entire army of bees.
So, I sat down to make a list of native, food-bearing plants that I thought would grow well in that space. American hazelnut (Corylus americana), Fiddlehead fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), chokecherry (Aronia melanocarpa), service berry (Amelanchier laevis), American cranberry (Viburnum trilobum) and of course more pawpaw.
All of those plants were native to the United States, which means they would blend well with the Native Woodland Walk, and also yield a food crop. I got to work planning, then ordering plants and waiting through a long, cold winter.
Then, on an overly warm spring day, we planted them, and like all the best landscape renovations, it took two full days of weeding, digging, planting and watering all to create a landscape that looked like it’s been there for years.
To me that feels like success. My goal is always to create garden spaces that are in harmony with the world around them. The kind of garden where visitors stop and think, “Wait, was that always there?”
Thanks to the dedicated efforts of the amazing Tyler Education department there are still great things for kids in this garden too. There are natural items to climb on, a willow tunnel to run through, fairy houses to spot and sidewalk chalk to draw with.
It’s my hope that everyone who stops by to visit this landscape will see food in a different way. If you stand in the center of the fenced-in vegetable garden, you are in a world of carefully cultivated heirloom vegetable crops. As you walk down the paths and through the gates, you move almost back in time towards wild foods. Along the fence on the outside are cultivars of strawberries, apple trees, grape, currant, figs and even Saskatoon Juneberries. Walking further towards the woods takes you through the cranberries, fiddlehead ferns, hazelnuts and chokecherries – all non-cultivated varieties. Beyond that is the forest where, with the right lens, you’ll find other plants that provide humans and wildlife with food. Spreading oaks, spicebush, and wild pawpaw groves.
Perhaps we can imagine more landscapes that incorporate food plants, for us and for our animal and insect neighbors. I doubt I’ll ever get enough hazelnuts or cranberries to donate to the Food Bank for Delaware County. But I’ll probably get enough to show to visitors and school groups. And certainly the squirrels, chipmunks and birds will enjoy stopping by.
After all — a heathy forest feeds everyone.
