Five days studying the principles of Forest Gardening proved to be interesting, informative and very enjoyable. I left London at six in the morning on Wednesday and headed for the High Heathercombe Centre in Devon. It's located on the eastern side of Dartmoor, a very short distance from the wilds of the moor itself.

 I wondered if I was making a mistake taking my tent when a bed was available. I've backpacked across the moor several times in summer- freezing cold, driving rain, thick fog. By contrast late February proved to be mild, dry and sunny!

 The teaching sessions were a mixture of theory and practice. Aranya gave us the benefit of his remarkable wealth of knowledge; he is a brilliant communicator with the knack of explaining complex ideas as plain common sense. The demos were led by Phil Gamble on topics such as propagating, grafting and pruning. I hadn't met him before but he is clearly a gifted horticulturalist who has a life's work of experience to draw on.
 I should also mention that Mel who runs the centre made sure we were well looked after, as did several volunteers who work with her. For one thing the food was superb! And crucially there was a great bunch of people who had signed up for the course.

 There was a hands on aspect to the proceedings. The aim was to design and plant an area of sloping hillside adjacent to the centre with fruit trees and bushes. It's a tough locale: an exposed site at a high elevation on soil that's very good -rich in humus, friable- but acidic PH i.e. certainly suitable for ericaceous plants, less so for others.

 The day we did the first planting was not bad weather by any means but became increasingly misty as time went on.

 Nonetheless we made good progress and next day the sun shone once more. NB I'm looking forward to returning for the second part of the course in early May because the green shoots of thousands of Bluebells were poking through and should be flowering about then.

 The area we worked on was an extension of some existing planting carried out seven years ago. Those trees seem to be thriving and coping with the conditions.
 I'll post another entry in the next day or two concerning the fundamentals of the subject exemplified in a visit to the forest garden developed by Martin Crawford on a 2 acre site not far away at Dartington. It is possibly the most realised example of forest gardening in the UK and he has been researching, implementing and innovating there for over 25 years.