edible landscapes

What is an “edible landscape” - why and how should we use them? As a concept, this has been little explored in the UK, with the exception of some permaculture and agroforestry practitioners, yet in a sense, it is a logical extension of the traditional cottage garden - a landscape that is beautiful yet which produces food. As a growing method, it has a potential for far greater use and I believe we have the need for a wide ranging practice and culture of edible landscaping. At the very least, harvesting unusual fruit and nuts from your garden is rewarding and fun!

An edible landscape can be described in simple terms as one where many or all of the plants chosen have an edible product - usually fruit or nuts, but can also be flowers, leaves, bark or sap. Some of this is just good, old fashioned gardening, but it goes beyond that too. The other difference is that much of the edible produce comes from perennials, shrubs and trees, rather than traditional vegetables. For example, public parks could be planted with many nut bearing trees which look beautiful but also give high yields, which people could harvest. What better way to regenerate usage of urban space, than to have freely available nuts and berries?

The beauty of this approach to food production is that it can be agricultural, park-like or a personal garden but they all have similar properties: low input - high yield, with multiple crops produced at different times of year, good for the environment (no tillage involved, so no soil loss), diverse, increased biomass (the lungs of the world) urban temperature and air quality control, rainwater retention, etc. etc. You can kick a ball around under such trees, plant crops, run sheep or pigs, grow understory plants and soft fruit. All the while, you are creating beautiful, protected, productive space which has good ambiance and good ecology. What reason more could one want?

These techniques are especially applicable to the hot, dry regions of the world. Deserts are spreading at an alarming rate, due entirely to people pressure - ploughing marginal lands, cutting down trees for firewood, overgrazing of cattle and goats - all these things lead one way - to deserts. There are fantastic tree crops such as Prosopis, which produce protein rich seeds, and can absorb night moisture from their leaves and store it for future use. Like most legumes, they are nitrogen fixers too. In the careful use of such plants we can create gardens from places that are turning into hell.

This doesn't affect us here, I hear you say, but it does. All our problems are global in nature and the fact that supermarket produce travels an average of 1200 miles, tells you most food comes from abroad. Global agricultural output is falling at alarming rates (China's grain yield has dropped by 30m tonnes - more than Canada's entire output), while the world's population continues to grow exponentially. Biofuels are beginning to add to the problem, as they compete for the same crops as we need to eat and will be afforded by richer countries over poor. As agricultural systems become overwhelmed and fuel costs spiral, food scarcity will become more frequent. Whilst in the developed countries we may never actually go hungry, food diversity will certainly diminish and home produced food will become both desirable and probably essential.

Whilst many nut trees have high yielding cultivars, they take some years to establish and produce prolific crops, so time is of the essence. Also there are many valuable shrubs out there such as landscape favourites Elaeagnus and Mahonia, which are excellent food crops, but which need a programme of selection and breeding to increase reliability and yields, rather than selection just for beauty.

I've hardly touched upon the subject, but you can read my article on edible shrubs, and here are a couple of excellent UK sites to research further: Plants for a Future www.pfaf.org and The Agroforestry Research Trust www.agroforestry.co.uk