When you have plenty of land to make a garden, you can mimick the form of a forest fairly well. Just go study up in your Zone 5 (Permaculture Zone 5), then create a backbone of trees (Food forests mimic nature's own gardens) that will make up your food forest.

But in other environments that don't traditionally look or act like forests, this doesn't work as well. For example, it's difficult to grow a half acre forest in your 200 sq.ft. yard in the middle of the city, and it's impossible to do so on a postage sized apartment balcony in London. This is where understanding the difference between the form of a forest and the function of a forest is useful.

Mimicking the form of a forest is relatively simple - do what nature does (align with nature for thriving gardens) exactly. You dont really even need to know why it works because the natural systems in place take care of the rest.

In contrast, designing a garden through understanding the function of a forest requires an understanding of how those systems work (Inefficiency is where we learn best) under the hood. It means you've done your homework in a fundamental, principle based, sort of way rather than a surface level understanding of nature's tactics.

Citations

• Gaia’s Garden

#permaculture #toolong