Forest Gardens

Ecosystems of co-liveable forests have been on our horizon since a few years now, as part of our intention to grow cultures of forests, in poetic and direct ways. It's one of the long-term areas of attention and research alive within Foresta both as a symbolic and a real practice.

Practically, it is a preparation for landing with Foresta in a place and engaging with landscape care in very direct materially engaged ways. How can agricultural practices cultivate new possibilities for relating to the diverse communities of life and engage into landscape relations so that we can work as part of an ecosystem in harmony with natural processes?

In our inquiry into working toward regenerative approaches to land care, cultivating Earth-based wisdom needed for the deep restoration, fostering and caring for biodiversity, serving the needs of multispecies inhabitants, we are in continuous apprenticeship from the forests, and in this case more specifically practices of agroforestry.

Metaphorically, forest gardens unfurl within ethics of attentive multispecies conviviality and offer valuable cues for navigating a transition towards an ecologically regenerative living, inviting deep listening, making space for abundance, designing for mutualism, regenerating connections and holding space for a more symbiotic togetherness.

When contemplated closely, forest gardens reveal their manifold tangible and intangible qualities, transmit generosity through their capacities to foster biodiversity, offer food, medicine, and other vitalities of a shared landscape for many, humans included. We look forward to begin to practice what we are learning from these complex symbiotic systems: to slow-grow food, as well as habitats for varieties of living beings, to facilitate conditions for biodiversity, to transfer passion for nature, and engage with many other ways in which forest cultures offer frameworks that enable change.

Forests invite us to reimagine and live into other ways of knowing and being, conceiving of the self and community. From forests we learn to see the world as complex entangled interactions of multispecies agents and their mutual becoming. Contemplated through a tender lens of imagination, forests offer us an imaginary where, within all kinds of relationships, attentiveness and connectedness replace fragmentation and exploitation, leading towards a more symbiotic togetherness.

Here we are sharing our learnings from observing, thinking, meeting human guardians and cultivators of forest gardens, as well as beginning to experiment and grow our own practice within Foresta’s place in Asturias, through the formats of Woods in the Sound, an ever-evolving article A forest can be anywhere, as well as through an invitation for anyone who resonates and would like to find a way to collaborate to begin the conversation and potentially join us Thinking with a Garden.

Woods in the Sound
video podcast

Season 2

Forest Gardens

This season we are exploring the subject of forest gardens, otherwise known as food forests or regenerative agroforestry. Agroforestry is an inspiring and useful framework people worldwide find when searching to move towards regeneration of monocultural landscapes and healing of agricultural deserts, with an intention to grow food (and not only) in more meaningful ways while taking care of biodiversity, soil life, and other reciprocal relationships.

EPISODES

Images: Carolina Monterrubio, Egor Sviridenko, Sabina Enéa Téari