About the Books
This comprehensive two-volume book constitutes an in-depth course in ecological garden design. Written in a passionate, clear, and engaging style, it integrates the vision and ecology of forest gardening with practical design, establishment, and management strategies. While Edible Forest Gardens was written as an integrated whole, each volume can stand alone as valuable learning tools and references.
No other book on forest gardening integrates ecology and design as thoroughly, and with such rigor, as this. The two volumes combine to give you the most up-to-date and advanced synthesis available on the subject. If you are serious about ecological gardening, ecological horticulture, permaculture design, or forest gardening—whether you are an amateur, a professional, a student, a researcher, or just a hard-core eco-freak—then the two-volume set is for you. It is an investment in intellectual capital that will pay dividends for years to come.
Volume 1: Ecological Vision and Theory
Hardcover. 8 x 10. Approximately 356 pages.
Numerous color and black and white photos, illustrations, and tables. Bibliography, glossary, index, plant and resource lists.
This volume begins with an overview of the ecological and cultural context for forest gardening in modern North America. It also lays out a holistic vision that guides the study of forest ecology that follows. This ecological exploration forms the bulk of volume 1, and offers clear and specific direction for forest garden design and management. Three forest garden case studies ground the concepts discussed in the book and bring them life. Volume 1 concludes with colorful descriptions of forest gardening's "Top 100" species, and useful listings of information and organizational resources.
Volume 2: Ecological Design and Practice
Hardcover. 8 x 10. Approximately 617 pages. Numerous black and white photos, illustrations, and tables.
Comprehensive appendices on forest garden plants and animals, resource lists, glossary, bibliography, indices.
Volume 2 focuses all of its attention on effective design and practice. It organizes the ecological strategies from volume 1 in a way that is accessible to gardeners and designers. It offers a unique 'pattern language' for forest garden design, and provides detailed advice for how to design, prepare the site for, plant, and maintain your forest garden. Volume 2 also includes a unique Plant Species Matrix and several associated appendices which offer a wide-ranging catalog of the ecology, uses, and ecosystem functions of the best temperate-climate forest garden plants, and a few edible mushrooms, from around the world.