Hornsey Rise Forest Gardens

Stepping into the Forest Garden is like entering another world. All around is lushness and abundance

Just to the south of Crouch End on Hornsey Rise are two "urban community forest gardens", urban spaces inspired by Robert Hart's vision of 'new city forests'

The gardens were developed within the Naturewise project, founded in 1990 in Islington. Co-originator Marek Lubelsky explained; “We wanted to show that local people could take control of inner city land, and we believed that we should have informed choices about how to use it.”

Naturewise set up the first urban community forest garden in the UK. Situated on a steeply banked, south facing, one fifth of an acre of Council owned land in Crouch Hill. Surrounded on three sides by blocks of flats, and on the north side by a tarmacked football pitch where local youth congregate, it was highly exposed to vandalism as well as having a sub-soil consisting largely of rubble and waste.

In 1995 work began on a second forest garden, this time in the grounds of nearby Margaret MacMillan Day Nursery, a kindergarten providing pre-school care to over 200 small children from a very wide social, cultural and ethnic mix.

Whilst this second forest garden is still going strong, the original forest garden has not fared so well. Left largely to fend for itself against the ravages of stray dogs and footballs, the site has developed in a wilder, untamed direction – more urban forest than forest garden – still a valuable green space with all sorts of benefits for people and wildlife, but no longer the productive edible landscape originally envisaged.

Naturewise continue to run regular  forest garden volunteer days, permaculture courses and woodland weekends. Co-founder Alpay Torgut has now set up West Wales Naturewise, who have created yet another forest garden, as well as forging links with the burgeoning Transition Towns movement. For more information see www.naturewise.org.uk.

For photos from Naturewise (and other London based Permaculture projects), see http://www.flickr.com/photos/naturewise/.

There is also a Naturewise Yahoo Group.

(This post was adapted in it's entirety from an article by Graham Burnett which originally appeared in Permaculture Activist 69, Autumn 2008. The full article and the full set of pictures can be seen on the Naturewise website.)