The Sombrun Forest Garden Project

Dear Reader, you’ve probably been thinking I’ve gone into hibernation, like the bumblebee above did, and in one sense you’d be right. It’s been a long pause since the last Blog in November, but a necessary one – a time for reflection, coupled perhaps with a bit of ‘writer’s block’. But in fact, far from burying myself away, I’ve had the most productive winter so far, not only physically in the Forest Garden as you’ll see, but personally also. I hope you will think that the wait has been worth it, because together, The Forest Garden and me, we have moved on – considerably!

Back in 2018, I wrote the sub-heading to the title of the Sombrun Forest Garden website – ‘Small-scale agroforestry in constant evolution’ – little realising the full weight of this statement. Because not only is the Forest Garden showing clear signs of its continuing, nascent evolution over the five or so years since then, but my own involvement, ideas and commitment have grown considerably too.

One major advance is that this winter, partly because of the work I have been doing, the ‘forest’ aspect of the Project has become much more evident, which is a joy to me; the garden is beginning to mature, and I feel I am entering a new stage.

Working in the Forest Garden always reminds me too to think about the planet around me, seeing the Project and myself within the wider world and the bigger perspective, something I feel strongly we should do. And, although the current political, economic, environmental and social state of the world is depressing and disturbing, behind it all there is cause for hope, and the Project here is a symbol of that. Until now, my views on matters outside the functioning of the Forest Garden itself have been reserved for the Articles section of the website (see the menu above), but increasingly I see the two as inextricably linked, not in a separate box.

We are in a time of great upheaval, that is clear, an exponential shift on many fronts, which is in the course of changing the world for ever, passing through many dire and bizarre events, a bit like a Tolkien novel. And although there are many thousands of amazing initiatives and clear-headed advances across the world today, and notably in the environmental and ecological sectors, they are often largely unseen and unheard, because of the ‘noise’ of the upheaval. But it seems to me that we are probably still in the ‘flat’, early stage of that exponential shift as it gathers momentum, and then as we understand and accept the importance of these actions, the curve will begin to rise sharply, the balance will change, and the old ideas and noise will become obsolete and valueless.

One example of the monumental changes that are taking place is the move towards what I think of as “Feminicity” (an ‘uncommon noun’ say the online dictionaries, but it seems to capture what I want to say), and we are beginning to see evidence of that today. It’s not “feminism” or “femininity” but something more subtle and nuanced, to do with the spirit or ethos of the feminine as opposed to the masculine. It’s a cultural and societal move away from the patriarchal model established ten or twelve thousand years ago with the last great paradigm shift – from hunter/gatherers to farmers, the creation of agriculture, and all the social, political, ecological and organisational changes that that brought.

And with that came a new-found need to organise, categorise and control, which in turn over millennia gave rise to what we now call “Science”. But science, despite its many brilliant achievements, is quite a restricted discipline, and it’s time to acknowledge that our view of it needs to change. It too, needs to look at the bigger picture. On the research level, sterling work continues, but really behind closed doors. To the everyday person in the street, however, science is taken as ‘gospel’, an unquestionable truth, ‘clinically proven’. But in reality it can and should always be questioned, because it only ever regards a problem in isolation, divorced from the world that surrounds it.

Here with the Sombrun Forest Garden Project you might think that everything I do is based on science. But you would be wrong. Yes, that plays a useful part, but essentially, this Project is about Nature, and Nature and Science don’t seem to get along very well. Nature is beyond Science, which, just in the very recent past (maybe two or three hundred years) in the form of organisations which are founded on science, has tried to contain and control Nature; it hasn’t succeeded, and it will never succeed. But by taking this course of action, we can now see that an essential planetary equilibrium has been destroyed and irreplaceable reserves of resources are being exhausted. And now Nature is biting back, in my view justifiably so.

So, with this Project as with the wider world, we need to go beyond the science to the experiential, developing the awareness or intuition which resides in all of us (which can come for example from the simple unencumbered observation of a flower you are attracted to) but which has become submerged. This is something science can rarely do, hidebound as it is to its own narrow terms of reference. The great and much-missed scientist James Lovelock was given to using terms such as ‘intuition’ and ‘holistic’, and intuition is not such a strange idea; again, it is only in the last few centuries that ‘reason’ and ‘pragmatism’ have come to dominate. Before that, we trusted our own observation and feeling (a dirty word to many scientists) to a much greater extent. Science’s obsession with ‘proof’ holds it back from accepting concepts such as homeopathy or lunar energies, or using nettles and pumpkin seeds in resolving my prostate problem, because it’s true, they cannot be ‘proved’ in a limited, scientific sense. But they are very real, nevertheless, as shown in the work of Rudolf Steiner and Maria Thun in biodynamics in the 20th century.

You might think that I am advocating a retrograde movement, that we are so much more advanced these days than in those centuries and millennia gone by. Yes, of course in many ways we are, and we should embrace that, but that doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water! The point is that it needs to be kept in perspective, and that time-honoured experiential knowledge still has great value today. Take for example, the rapidly increasing recognition of indigenous communities around the world, and the knowledge that they have represented for millennia. It’s time to challenge the current unchallengeable status of “Science”. Here in the Sombrun Forest Garden, I am working with Nature, above all. If Science can inform me in that process, all well and good. But it is Nature that will always show me the way, be the ultimate arbiter, and I will be the better for it.

And the bumblebee at the top of the page? The woodland crocuses first made their appearance on January 24th, and I happened to come across the bee a few days after that. It was very drowsy, climbing from flower to flower instead of flying, perhaps from having just woken up and thought “Wow! Nectar!”, or perhaps from being weighed down with too much of the stuff! In any case, the bee and the flower symbolise a new beginning and everything I have been writing about here, and they quite rightly have pole position in this Blog.

Well, I think that’s quite enough for now! The practical side of the winter’s Forest Garden work is already mostly written in my head, so I’ll update you on that in a few days’ time.