A forest can be anywhere

How it all began

On a February morning in the province of Valencia we are leaving the house to spend another sunny day outdoors. It’s 17 C° and the impeccably blue sky promises radiant warmth. Too warm for the season, the locals have told us. In fact the past few years have been exceptionally hot compared to last century's averages. It has been observed with particular vigilance by local cherry tree farmers, when winter temperatures are not dropping low enough for trees to have a rest, and the rain no longer comes in predictable "wet seasons", catching them off guard. They say the winter 2022 was the third driest since the 1950s, while the spring arrived with almost two months of torrential rains, washing away the cherry blossom, and the expected harvest yields. This change of familiar climate and weather rhythms has meant inevitable turn for the established livelihoods of the majority of local farmers. A few years in a row of reduced or skipped harvests has often meant bankruptcy to small family businesses that rely on their monoculture fruit orchards for sustenance.

That morning we drive past many of those abandoned plots - olives, almonds and cherry trees are standing in solemn rows in the mids of dry naked soil. Since some time now we have been researching other models to be with and work with the land and the multispecies ecosystems, and today this inquiry is taking us to the city of Valencia, where we are meeting a local farmer and co-founder of an association dedicated to agroecology and food sovereignty, that has recently started a small food forest and a place of cultural exchange for the community.

But this story actually begins earlier. A few years ago the outset of the pandemics radically changed our work trajectory as Foresta Collective. It was just before the first lockdown as we left the city with its cultural institutions (closed for unpredictably unknown period of time) and the safety of commissioned work. We moved into a small place in the countryside next to a forest 200 km north of Berlin. It’s here that the online life of Foresta Seasonal Academy began. Every day we were leaving the house to spend the day outdoors, equipped with a laptop and a mobile router, connecting with humans from different places on the planet, holding space for symbolic practices dedicated to ecological interconnectedness and multispecies care, on a floating vessel, carried by the invisible waves of internet, within thin but fertile air. And this is perhaps where something started shifting in our perception. Now, a few years forward, we couldn't go back to the pre-pandemic normal. Something has shapeshifted, and we needed to find a new form.

Slowly it began to dawn on us that Foresta could grow not only as an invisible forest of intentions for living otherwise, but also as a physical relationally constituted place, a place where concepts and ideas could connect to the everyday reality of lived life and ethics of attentive conviviality, where we could connect to sensitivities shaped in and with places outside the current anthropo-techno-urban imaginations. Slowly that new perception grew into a conscious search for landing in a place where we could live with the tirakuna (a word we learned from Marisol de la Cadena, that could be translated from Quechua as earth-beings), in complexity and in reciprocity, becoming a more integral part of a living ecosystem as a multispecies collective.

The time of Forestamorphosis began. We went into a cocoon of a long search. We had to disappear in the form we have known ourselves, to enter the vacuum of the unknown, to give ourselves fully to the forces of metamorphoses that could bring us into a physical world in new ways. We no longer wanted to focus exclusively on intentional imagination, things needed to become real, tangible, materially engaged. Over the next couple of years we spent quite some time visiting places. With time we realized that there are rather few wild(er) landscapes left in the geographies we could imagine calling home. Most often they were placed within realms of protection and conservation. We realized that what was designated as living "close to nature" and could be accessible to us, usually meant living on the edge of a monoculture field.

And so it’s here, on the edge of a monoculture field, where this inquiry and this particular story really begins. In our search process for landing with Foresta in a place, we came across the concept (and what even looks like a contemporary movement) of forest gardens, also known as food forests, edible forests, synthropic agroforestry, and by other names, referring to similar approaches with their particular nuances. We felt immediately curious and fascinated by ways these living systems are both regenerative in their nature, and also invite humans into active collaboration yet not placing us in their center. The ideas and practices we encountered talking to guardians and cultivators of such systems became a source of learning and inspiration for navigating human transition towards an ecologically regenerative living. So in this story we are thinking aloud about what attracts us in the notion of a co-liveable forest — a living system as a source of biodiversity, food, medicine, and other tangible and intangible qualities of a shared landscape. We will write about what we have learned from those we’ve met on our way so far, who have shared their experiences with us. As our stories often do, this one too will remain a living process that will continue changing and growing with new encounters and experiences that come our way.

Rhythms of a forest

Given the recent analysis of carbon isotope in almost 6-million-year-old soils in Ethiopia, human being was born (or at least most certainly preferred to live) in the forest. Looking at the mysterious history of human life with and in the forests, far away in the blur of time we see (or rather imagine) human traces of conviviality within a mingle of multi-layered woods. The feeling of a tight grasp of our hand on a tree branch conveys as much safety, as the joy we might feel filling our nostrils and ears with the sweet symphony of smells and sounds of a forest.

So how come we have been gradually alienating from these origins? Was the forest a more dangerous place to survive than the grasslands of savanna? Or was it a less convenient habitat, once humans needed to develop more effective ways of finding food for their growing populations and found themselves more likely to settle in the open areas, cutting down trees for their needs (first axes are dated 500,000 years ago)? Or was the ice age a game-changer, kilometres high at times, crushing and freezing most life forms?

Taking this thread through layers of time we imagine the ice gradually receding, digging craters of lakes on the deserted plains. We imagine the forests beginning to grow again, walking in a speed of a few hundred meters a year, spreading across the (European in this case) continent, regenerating the thawing soil with the bodies of its decaying trees and -generation after generation- growing on with more vigour. Birches and pines "running" in front of the slower and heat-loving oaks. Beeches trunking their way forward. Fungi, mosses and lychens following along. Birds, animals and other life forms thriving and dying, integral parts of this slow but persistent walk of a super organism that is shaping itself as it moves and spreads, celebrating life and creating and containing ever richer life-generating conditions.

Human animals too are somewhere in that picture of cyclical forestal rhythms. But we are not in the centre, not so visible. Not until there are more of us, and we begin to use those axes to cut more trees, to make our houses, warm them up, cook our food. Then also to make space for our crop fields and pastures, to build our ships, ploughs, cupboards, and all kinds of things we invent as we progress.

What is now conventional agriculture is a symptom of a process that started long ago. Without the critical renewal of itself, gradually leading to biodiversity loss, ground water pollution, contributing to soil depletion and the spread of deserts, and causing other threats to ecosystemic health. Excessively and rather inattentively interfering with the outer environments, we may have forgotten how intertwined they are with the inner ones, how we are composed by the soil, the air, the water, how we take the outside in each time we breath, eat, drink, and just walk around — our porous skin touched by the wind — and how everything exists together, with each other and for each other, how our bodies have inner organs and outer organs, composed by other creatures, and how we live in symbiosis with them.

When we visited Wouter van Eck and the food forest he co-initiated in the Netherlands more than 15 years ago, he spoke to us about the experience of landscape sorrow in the agricultural deserts around his house, of strong separation between nature and agriculture, where natural reserves become a protected oasis of biodiversity, while the immense territories of agricultural fields become more and more silent, species and habitats disappearing from them. And how now that we are searching for reconnection with forests — plants, animals, and all the varieties of living creatures in their symbiotic interconnectedness become our teachers on a path of bridging ‘nature’ and ‘agri(culture)’ back together through regenerative practices.

Speaking to Wouter on a rainy day in his Ketelbroek food forest, we find out that his personal journey into becoming one of the formative researchers and promoters of agroforestry in Europe today starts in a food forest in Kenya, where ironically after studying political science and development in the Netherlands, he came to monitor Dutch development projects aimed at “improving” food production in Africa by using conventional European farming techniques. It’s during this visit to Kenya that he came across a local food forest system that produced avocados, mangos, coffee, and other edibles in layered forest-like arrangements. A few years later the first food forest in the Netherlands is born, carefully designed and planted by Wouter and his partner Pieter, who have selected plant species that are both adapted to the colder Northern European climate, yet also resilient to more extreme temperatures that the outlook of changing planetary climate is bringing forth.

A forest garden

Strolling through the archived layers of history we realize that techniques of planting different species together are ancient. Forest garden practices originate from traditional agroforestry cultures from around the world. On our research journeys we often hear that tropical home gardens have been part of people's lives since thousands of years: in Kenya, Kerala, Java, Tanzania (Chagga people), Sri Lanka (Kandyan people), Central America (Maya and Zapotecs people), and other regions. Martin Crawford, a thinker and practitioner of agroforestry and a founder of the Agroforestry Research Trust, notes that food forests have been present in warmer regions for at least 10,000 years, but their adoption in colder climates has only gained momentum in the last 40 years.

A forest garden can be described as a self-sustaining diverse and productive ecosystem designed to mimic the structure and the temporal sequencing of a wild forest. The core idea of such agroforestry system is to grow food in ways that support biodiversity, reduce the need for human intervention, and promote healthy soil and water retention. Once established, the forest supports multispecies lives, providing food and habitat for many, including humans.

Design process of such ecosystems with the layered structure and a complex architecture, happens not from a human point of view but from the ecological point of view. The composition usually contains 7 layers. Starting from bottom up, there is a rhizosphere dimension of tubers and other plants with interesting roots, as well as mushrooms. Then there is a ground cover layer of non-woody plants (edible, medicinal, ornamental, unclassifiable, all mixed together). A herbaceous layer of perennial vegetables and herbs. A layer of shrubs and bushes. A layer of low crown that are usually fruit and nut trees. The high canopy tall trees with very deep roots. And finally there are climbers connecting everything and everyone vertically. Although there could also be an aquatic plant layer, and other possibilities to think dimensionally. This can be considered a basic architecture mimicking a natural forest. And then it's up to you how romantic or rational you want your forest garden to be, as Wouter van Eck phrases it.

Forest gardens are currently most commonly known as a farming system. Even though indeed most of our encounters with forest gardens have been connected to food production, edible outcome is not the only interesting aspect of such ways of growing. We like to think of a forest garden as a practice of recuperating respect towards the natural world and how it operates in reciprocity. It’s a path we see towards harmonising human presence within the ecosystem. It is also a way for us to keep on learning from the forests: how they are organized, how the different creatures live together in diversity, how they form an alive polyorganism, and how humans can become a cocreative part of it, without falling into a habit of conditional togetherness, where everything needs to be on our terms. While being a biodiverse productive ecosystem, everything that originates in a forest garden is shared between all beings who participate in it to satisfy their needs. Everyone tending to and living in and as a forest garden becomes part of a collective, growing and expanding together. So how is this way of growing in space and in time happens?

Regenerating connections

Back to Valencia, where on a February morning we drive on the outskirts of a city through vast agricultural fields. Left and right from us big artichokes line up in neat lengthy rows, other fields nearby have been freshly ploughed. Valencia is encircled by the historic agricultural landscape known as "l'Horta de València" (the Huerta of Valencia), which has been cultivated for over a millennium. This fertile area has relied on an intricate irrigation system introduced during the 10th century by the Islamic settlers, using a network of channels called acequias to distribute water from the Turia River. Spanning about 8,000 hectares, the Huerta continues to produce varieties of crops, mainly vegetables, fruits and rice. This farmland is however still within the city borders, a short bike ride from the nearby neighbourhoods.

A perfect spot if you want to make a lab for nature-culture connections, to experiment with soil and social regeneration. Or grow a food forest, which can cater for both tasks. And that’s exactly the project initiated here by a farmer (and not only) Xavi Luján and supported by an artist Chiara Sgaramella and other collaborators. Xavi has trained as a forestry engineer and graduated in international cooperation and development. Skilfully integrating ideas from diverse critical thinking schools into his practical vision of the project, Xavi speaks of himself not only as a farmer, he is also a thinker, an activist, a community organiser, without which he can’t be a farmer, seeking integrity amidst his diverse interests. We came to meet him at l’Alter de Vorasenda — an agro-association producing organic food on the principles of community supported agriculture, a place for cultural exchange, and a young food forest.

A forest garden design begins by following the clues of a place - its climate, water flows, and the stories told by its soil. In fact some say this is where it all begins — with the ecological successions of soil. Xavi is speaking to us of the stages in which the land can regenerate from a state of a desert all the way to the forest. The first stage has to do with covering the soil, to preserve humidity, to protect it from the strong sun or/and wind. This creates conditions to start regeneration - microorganisms come back to live in the soil, the first succession of plants begin developing (aka pioneer species, mainly from gramineae, brassicaceae and leguminosae families, such as ryegrass, mustard or clover), new connections form, expand and become more complex across several stages of such ecological succession.

Xavi speaks about his experience of seeding a forest garden on a degraded land. He had his plan for what species he wanted to grow, but they didn't choose to come out. He was demanding from the degraded soil, which was in an early phase of regeneration, to be able to nurture plants with higher expectations towards their habitat. What this provoked was plagues. The soil was not ready to be in relation with those plants just yet, it needed plants that would be able to grow on poor soil, just covering it, bringing nutrients, humidity, regenerating microbial life, bacterial and fungal cells, protists, archaea. These plants of the first stage are usually considered weeds. So humans tend to try and get rid of them, giving the soil some chemical nutrition instead to make it produce the plants they desire to see grow here. Plants however are not independent from the soil, not separate. They are together one system, which when understood and catered for properly, will thrive. The contrary narrative, where soil isn’t much more than abstract dirt and plants are objects that can be made to grow if we need them, given the right conditions and external input of nutrients, is part of a fragmented view of the world that has lost a sense of interconnectedness and mutualism. Such fragmented view is often responsible for creating dependency on herbicides, pesticides, and external energy sources and stimulants in a sterile system. Rather than listening to pests as a symptom of disbalance, a farmer with such a world view will try to fight with chemicals.

Borrowing microbial life to help kickstart the soil microbiome of this land, Xavi follows fellow advice and brings soil from the nearby forest to mix in. He also tells us of the need to copy ways of a forest as a strategy to seek balance, converting spaces degraded by conventional agriculture into spaces where life can reappear in all its forms: from the microbial level to animals. A healthy ecosystem knows how to generate life. A forest stimulates growth and self-regulation of life. It creates conditions it needs for living, for example those of humidity. Forest is a builder of soils, and healthy soils create bonds, form clusters of connections. It's a complex interdependent ecosystem which is a result of life sustaining and producing itself. This process is supported by the culture of no effort, which asks for more humility from humans. 

Xavi's vision for this food forest is to be a space where the bond between people and the land—a vínculo perpetuo—can take hold and thrive. Though still in its early stages, the project is about much more than growing food, it's about co-creating a system that mirrors resilience and complexity of social life. This forest isn't only a collection of plants and other creatures, but a reflection of a new kind of politics—one that doesn’t need to be imposed but emerges naturally from the land, where ecologies reach into the social domains. For him it’s a practice of resisting the forces of capitalism that often break bonds. Broken social bonds also means broken environmental bonds, as the natural and the social come from the same essence. Xavi speaks of regenerative agriculture as the art of encounter, the essence of which is relation, connection, exponential bonds that form a system of a forest.

Restoration of bonding is a planetary task. Whether within microbial life, diversity of plants or animals, or within the social context: the more connected we are, the stronger the bonding, the more the forest as a culture becomes possible. When we began hosting Woods in the City in Berlin, our main inquiries were around how to hold space and facilitate meeting between diverse humans within a more-than-human relational space, how to foster and deepen connections that transcend disciplinary and species boundaries, so that we can engage into dialogues, create alliances, and reimagine how to celebrate the vibrant complexity of the world rather than cutting it into simplified compartments. These inquiries unfolded as temporary convivial experiences towards a more symbiotic togetherness, and have then led us, clearly, into the forest. 

Making space for abundance and designing for mutualism

We are visiting another forest garden, this time in the province of Galicia in the north of Spain, where our host is Jaime Otero Páramo. Jaime has spent several years practicing diverse farming methods and learning about agroforestry around the world before starting his own food forest and a learning space for dissemination of agroecological theory and practice - Proyecto Dispersor. We follow Jaime around a large plot of land not far from the Atlantic coast as he shows us various food forest models that he has planted both as experiments and examples for his courses. His spacious thoughtfulness and calm expression, a low quiet voice and a tall bearded figure makes us think of Leo Tolstoy.

Jaime tells us that through the years of caring for a forest garden what he has found out is that plants like to be together — he is seeding them very densely and this way the forest growth is most vibrant. He points to two patches of diverse trees: on the one with a dense pattern trees are almost twice as large and lively as on the other - both were planted at the same time. The idea of how the vegetal organisms grow competing and trying to outperform each other is too narrow to be real, says Jaime, most of the times plants prefer togetherness. His work appears to us as a creation of conditions for mutualism — a form of symbiosis where all living beings that share space benefit from this co-living and collaboration. In a forest garden, Jaime continues, the different collaborating creatures, through successions, associations and other processes, create a system that is infinite. Such a system has a potential for an infinite energetic expansion, as life tends to do.

Forest is much more than trees. It's not a plantation. There are trees, there are also all kinds of other plants, of different sizes, shapes and ages. There are visible and invisible soil fauna, fungi, bacteria, plants, insects, birds, animals. Everyone who is part of the composition, including humans, everyone participating in such a forest also harvests from it and is sustained by it in various ways. It is a generously shared multispecies space. It is a landscape of abundance where everyone can find something to eat, somewhere to live, to heal themselves, or cater for other needs.

Making space for this abundance to happen is Jaime’s clear goal and joy. He laughs as he tells us how some participants of his courses are first astounded at the incredible affluence they find as they enter the forest. We look around — this landscape indeed drastically contrasts with the mono plantations of eucalyptus trees that Galicia has lots of - something that turned out to be a short-sighted government strategy in repurposing former pastures into mono “forests” that were expressions of hope for higher economic value for their owners. Such plantations aren’t forests though, their low biodiversity unmistakably creates sights and tells stories of artificial scarcity. Landscapes of abundance are so much needed, Jaime says, as they remind us that abundance is there and it is possible, and we can co-create it through our collective action.

Forest gardens provoke the mental construct of scarcity. Jaime is convinced that depressive monocultural landscapes form depressive people or even societies, while landscapes of abundance that are not mental constructs or wishful thinking but real experiences, where all kinds of different creatures, plants, birds, insects, visible and invisible soil fauna, hedgehogs, weasels, humans, and many others who come there, live there, harvest from the forest, and everyone has enough for their needs, as we mentioned earlier — such landscapes share, stimulate and inspire the wish to live.

Being intimately interlinked polyorganisms modelled after a natural forest, forest gardens are undoubtedly a powerful tool for change in many ways. Building natural coalitions as their process of life, they enhance biodiversity, absorb carbon, produce cooling microclimates in and around them. Forest gardens allow for the growth of food, medicine, fibres, and other need-fulfilling entities, thus offering a path towards a transition from industrial monocultures to integral polycultures — resilient ecosystems that offer nourishment to humans and other life beings, bringing nature and (agri)culture together.

Lynn Margulis wrote how life perpetuates through links, relations, and collaboration. This is what a structure or architecture of a forest garden aims to assist with: fostering innumerable number of connections that are organically happening between varieties of creatures and that have a unique language which we call nature. She suggests that life is born in collaboration. And from this collaboration each time more and more complex organisms have developed. We wouldn't have been here if our bacterial ancestors wouldn't have learned to collaborate, uniting with each other and giving birth to more and more complex bodies and beings.

Forest garden as a thinking tool

The forest garden as a thinking tool is inviting us into ecosystemic ways of thinking, into living and designing for mutualism and complementarity rather than competition within a scarcity mindset. From the outdated practices of extensively reducing forests for other land uses and diminishing biodiversity, it extends an invitation to move towards practices that create conditions for fostering biodiversity and collaboration. It also changes our sense of time. We reconnect to long term rather than more short term thinking. We start to perceive time as cycles tuned to seasons, as periods of growth, flourishing, harvest, decay, stillness, and rejuvenation. Just like cycle of our breath. Like the ever-changing seasons of our lives. Tuning in and aligning with the larger cyclical forces that govern everything.

In a forest garden complexity thinking begins to replace reductionist simplifications that shrink our worlds (we do not mean simplicity, that’s different). We begin to think in mutual connections rather than cutting the entanglement into dissociated fragments that as if allow for easy explanations. We learn to hold space for complexity, allowing the forest, its processes and relationships, to teach us. Take the astounding ways of circulation of nutrients and information through mycorrhizal networks between plants and fungi. Yet perhaps an even more determining shift would be one from a mindset of competing with the natural word, or fighting with it, towards weaving ourselves back into those multiplicities of relations.

When we spoke with Jaime, he shared that one of the learnings agricultural practices gave him was to offer a mirror into how he was constantly in the fighting mode: fighting to kill the invasive grass, fighting against snails that came to eat his food, against grasshoppers, caterpillars, ticks, flies, birds, wild boars, against the neighbour too. And what radically shifted his perspective was to start seeing what he understood as competition, as love. This changed the roots of his everyday practice: how he felt innerly, how he positioned himself in relation to others, how he was treating them (whether humans or other species), but also what and how he cultivated every day, and his emotions in relation to this process. He describes it as a movement from holding on to the culturally inherited ideas of ownership and a necessity to defend this ownership, towards being part of a community, where he experiences reciprocity, where everyone has enough for their needs and everyone belongs.

Forest garden as a thinking tool invites to make plenty of tiny and immense steps towards disrupting the mindset of "this is how things are" and shedding the skins of all those acquired and deeply internalized layers of culture that have become degenerative and need renewal. This shift also demands a change in how we view other-than-human living creatures. It demands that we learn to appreciate them in ways we maybe haven’t before. Plants are a good example. Those mute creatures that are so often seen as just that green backdrop to our lives, a decoration, or servants, taken for granted and whom we unconditionally expect to produce oxygen and food, while manipulating their life circumstances (like temperature, soil, company, etc) to our unquestioned benefit. Plants are alive sensuous beings that are the major actors of a forest garden, in fact the constituent forces of its liveliness (and of ours). Many of them like the company of others, enjoy growing in proximity and appreciate formations of multicultural communities. They like growing seasonally, and not being forced into perpetual artificial summer. They perceive much more than we think they do. Chapters could be and are being written about their crucial role in planetary habitability, their astounding intelligence, and many other aspects of vegetal beings and their lives.

In a forest garden as a polycultural collaborative organism, high biodiversity is crucial for its health, vitality and productivity. A variety of plants are welcomed into such a forest. Each expresses different meanings in the ecosystem. Some offer edible fruits, leaves, flowers, roots, nuts or seeds. Some offer shelter to other plants and animals, fix atmospheric nitrogen, which is needed as a nutrient throughout the ecosystem, attract insects or animals for pollination and pest control, use their deep root systems to bring up certain minerals from deeper layers of the soil, or have another supporting function. Some may just need to be present in the system, even if we find no rational function to assign them to fulfil. Humans often like to classify plants: this one is a tree, and that one is grass, this one is edible, this one is for medicine, and this here is ornamental. But looking closer it turns out that such labelling, while being helpful at some occasions, may also limit our outlook. Yet science acknowledges the relative nature of such categories, and a slow growing dwarf birch tree may take a shrub form, blackberry can develop into a bush or a vine, and a juniper tree choose to sprawl as groundcover. Forest garden as a practice offers a playground for opening up to get away from compartmentilized views, and help to start perceiving the beauty of a medicinal plant, and discovering the healing qualities of the one whose elegance we admire. And, as the pre-set categories and borders between the living beings of a forest garden start to blur away in our perception, perhaps we can turn the wisdom of this blurred gaze towards our human worlds, only to discover that some of the divisions we have thought given also need re-thinking?

The potential of a forest is inside you

In the course of our conversation with Xavi, it became clear that he doesn't think of regeneration and sustainability as purely environmental but rather as social phenomena. It’s humans who create the problems, he says, often it’s because of their personal living situations, because of being trapped in unhealthy relationships, and feeling lost or disoriented in the world. So from his point of view, when we look outside we don't really recognize the scope of the issue. Xavi has also shared with us how working with agriculture was and continues to be a huge learning also internally: into how he treats himself, others, and what comes back from the world as a reflection of these processes. He speaks of how we are not born into the knowledge systems of how to live well, how we often inherit strong beliefs and patterns of thought received over generations of what life is or should be. But at the same time we are born with the capacity to learn to be well. We are harnessed with possibilities to learn to live well and to trust this knowledge, and Xavi is convinced that entering into a forest system contributes to such learning.

Also Jaime speaks about how practicing agriculture he has learned more about himself than in any other situations. When practicing agriculture, we think that plants or animals don't understand us so we put down our masks in their presence and act as we are, consciously and unconsciously, he shares, and this process is offering a reflection of who we are and the culture that we carry inside, and therefore also offering a door into changing the status quo on a personal level. Also in a more direct way, landscapes offer a reflection of the collective inner world. Crossing different terrains we may understand more about the values that drive the specific communities responsible for these territories. Walking around we see the accepted attitudes towards trees, animals, insects and other beings. We immediately notice if the driving mindset is that of extractivism, if there is a wish for a quick gain at the expense of others, or if we see care. Reflective powers of the landscape also work the other way around: who you are will be shaped by what you see around you, a mindful walker noticing the ways you choreograph your attention and action. The potential of a forest is inside you.

On our journey often the forest gardens were havens of care, islands of hope. We felt nurtured by what we saw, heard, and otherwise sensed while visiting and spending time in those lifescapes. It was very obvious how these experiences would stimulate reconnection to the body, to one’s own embodied felt sense, emotions, sensations. A whole new dimension that opens up through such reconnection and, if nourished, makes it impossible to go back agreeing to live within systems that degrade life. Bodies too are part of the earth, of its multispecies living communities. And just like with the soil — they demand that we listen. Not as a doctrine, but as a window, as a way to experience other possibilities, other ways of being in the world, so that life can flourish in mutual ways into richness, resilience and abundance.

In our practice, navigating between personal and relational ecologies, we find that to make sense of complex processes without cutting the entanglement into pieces is possible as a collective practice - both between humans and in multispecies collectivity. Indeed this too demands listening and slowness to regain attentiveness, the sensuous knowledge, critical thinking and learning needed to combine human and more-than-human ways of knowing. So that our sense of self expands and our perspectives re-grow to be embodied and embedded, fluent in languages of the mind and the body, gradually changing our understanding. Forest gardens can hold space for such exchanges.

Everything can be seeded

Everything can be seeded, absolutely everything! Jaime smiles as he says that, and later as we wave each other goodbye that spring day, we observe his tall straight figure move between the young trees, reaching into the basket full of various seeds and gently scattering them between the trees in generous quantities.

For us these times of researching, reading, visiting, listening, exploring, meeting forest gardens and their guardians have been a practice of idea-seeding. Those ideas that chose to take root inside us are something we would like to share with you, and to plant further into the soil of Foresta-in-becoming. Foresta has been demanding to begin growing as a real forest since a while. Eventually we did listen.

Since some time now we find ourselves in the process of landing, our pockets full of seeds for this dreaming that Foresta is. We are humbled by all the journeys that are part of this process of worlding. We will continue to think with the questions that this new stage is offering us, as we try to build refuge, make sanctuary, plant the seeds, and slowgrow a world for what we love. And we’ll keep coming back to these learnings from forest gardens, while we continue seeding intentional multispecies communities and experimenting with living in reciprocity.

To complete this iteration, we want to warmly thank everyone who has welcomed us into their forests, met us online for a chat, sat with us over a cup of tea, and contributed to this story in its current and ever-evolving form.

Images: Foresta Collective