Punching through the canopy

Yesterday I wrote about creating a forest garden from scratch — turning a pasture into thriving food growing space. But what if there is already forest? How do you approach the problem from the other angle? This is one of the questions that came up at the Forest Garden talk I’ve been writing about this week. 

When a forest has grown a thick canopy, little light can get in. So while it may seem counterintutive, the key is to create holes in the canopy to let the light in. Either by cutting back branches or taking down whole trees. It is at the margins between the light and the dark areas that the most interesting growth happens. And so forest gardens need lots of these edges in order to be effective. 

Punching through the canopy to let the light in. It’s a powerful metaphor for breaking through an existing system to let a new one take off. The canopy is a metaphor for anything that stifles. The asphalt of an industrial estate covering acres of soil. Streets clogged with cars that stop chance encounters. Places through which no fresh air ciruclates. The doom of scarcity and control that stifle play and innovation. Organisational hierarchies that lock out change. 

But punch through that layer and a pocket of life can establish itself. A niche of new. And then we can join those niches up to create a network of change.

The Seven Levels of a Forest Garden

The following I learnt from Steve Watts, permaculture expert, during a talk he gave about Forest Gardens at the wonderful Coedfest, which he co-leads.


In a forest garden, plants and trees are layered over one another to create a growing system that is far more productive and diverse than farming a single crop on an area of land.

By stacking layers of complementary plants and trees over one another, you increase the amount of carbon that is being locked in, you increase the leaf litter that falls and so you increase the richness of the soil.

As Steve describes we can think of a forest garden has having seven layers:

  • High trees,
  • Lower trees,
  • Tall shrubs,
  • Small shrubs,
  • Ground cover,
  • Plants in which we harvest the roots, and

  • Climbers.

Each of these layers can produce food at different times of the year, and each of these layers provides a complementary role to the others. It is a beautiful model for a stacked system that is creating life. And it is a reminder that when we bring different systems together in complementary ways we can create much greater richness and diversity than we keep things separate.