The food at my brother's wedding was superb, but I'm afraid I didn't eat much.

You see, I'd filled up on apples, trying to sample every currently-ripe variety in the father of the bride's forest garden.

Ira Steinman has been forest gardening in the San Francisco Bay area for forty years, and the result is a masterpiece that will inspire those of us nurturing our first little trees.  I'm afraid I was only able to grab him out of the crowd for a few quick questions, but in many ways the garden spoke for itself.  Come along and we'll walk through together!

Ira had clearly put a lot of thought into structural elements --- I could tell because I barely noticed anything except plants until after I got home and started flipping through the photos.  Instead of jumping out at you, paths, arbors, and steps drew you down into the garden and enticed you to explore.

The property boasts a stunning view of the San Francisco Bay (or perhaps more technically the San Rafael Bay, but it's all connected).  Not wanting to block the view, Ira planted dwarf apples in the upper part of the garden, then graduated into what I'm guessing are semi-dwarfs further down the hill.

The garden location that permaculturalists would call zone 1, right outside the house, was a more formal area with benches, a lawn for gatherings (and marrying off their kids), and huge buddhas brought home from Asia to inspire conversation.  Just as tree size increased as you ventured further from the house, so did the garden become less formal and more wild.

I liked the fact that Ira stuck to brick pathways throughout, even in the less formal areas.  Despite being located in zone 8 in a microclimate that hasn't seen a killing frost for 22 years, the Bay area garden still has to contend with cool summer temperatures that can make ripening summer fruits a challenge.  I suspect that capturing heat with these stone pathways helps the summer garden, even though Ira reports his citrus still tend to be on the sour side.  (Most citrus fruit need summer heat to pack away sugars, which is why dwarf Meyer lemons are likely to give those of us growing citrus indoors better results than most other choices will.)

So what's growing in this stunning forest garden?  The apples are what captured my eye and what seemed to be doing the best, perhaps because Ira had chosen most of them from a nearby heirloom apple nurseriest who knew just what would thrive north of San Francisco.  But there were also lots of Asian persimmons, pears, and figs sporting unripe but luscious-looking fruit.

Ira's garden was also dotted with ripening citrus orbs.  I couldn't identify them all, but Ira pointed out an Algerian mandarin as he passed by doing his hostly duties, and a friend of the family shared a pomelo, which was a bit like a grapefruit.

The sheer quantity of fruit being produced by this 1.5 acre garden was astonishing.  I could tell from the apples littering the ground that the bounty was more than Ira could handle, and I fed lots of guests hand-plucked fruit without seeming to make a dent in the wares on display.  In fact, my stepmother stuck a few fruits in her purse to snack on later, and I suspect she wasn't the only one.

One of the things I liked the most about Ira's forest garden is that the trees were clearly king.  I think that many of us who read the forest gardening literature come into our gardens thinking that we can fill all five levels with delicious edible trees, shrubs, and herbs that won't compete at all.  But Ira didn't read any of those books (perhaps because they didn't exist when he got started), so he focused on trees in most of his garden, separating herbs like this Roman artichoke out into sunny clearings.  Knowing your priority in each part of a garden helps you mix and match secondary plantings without lowering yields from the plants you care about the most.

Despite focusing on the trees, Ira's landscape still felt like a forest garden, not like an orchard.  Trees were planted close enough together than they produced a nearly closed canopy, and grapes, kiwis, ornamentals, and shrubbier plants like figs were interspersed.  (Guests who had been to the garden before it was manicured for the wedding also told me that our ability to stroll down the paths is a new affair --- I suspect the garden had more of a jungle feel previously.)

I left the garden with more questions than answers.  What did the early stages of the garden look like?  Did Ira have to amend the soil heavily?  Does he water his trees with drip irrigation?  How long did it take before the forest garden began overflowing with bounty?  Did he face special challenges due to his location?  Are there species and varieties he particularly recommends for the Bay area?

The specifics aside, though, the garden itself told me everything I needed to know.  Forty years later, a forest garden does look like a forest while being as productive as a garden.  The idea has merit --- let's plant some more trees!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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