Imprint: Triarchy Press
Publication: June 2020
Extent: 198pp.
Size: 15.2 x 22.9 cm
ISBN: 978-1-911193-74-6
Price: £18 

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the garden of equal delights
the practice and principles of forest gardening

Anni Kelsey
​

Forest gardens are much in the news as an exemplary form of resilient, sustainable, small-scale agriculture and plenty has been written about them already.

But little has been written about the role of those who ‘look after’ them. 

A forest garden is edible, fertile, abundant and beautiful because it functions as an ecosystem. The forest gardener is an integral part of this ecosystem – which raises the question of what exactly the forest gardener should be trying to do. This book answers that question.

At the heart of a forest garden is the unique relationship between the garden and the gardener. The ‘garden of equal delights’ after which this book is named is Anni Kelsey’s forest garden high on a wet and windy Welsh hillside. Rejecting control and a regimen of planned interventions in favour of a more intimate, knowing and connected relationship with her garden, Anni describes how she learned to garden as an intrinsic – and equal – part of the ecosystem.  She uses her years of experience to formulate and explain in very practical terms a set of principles that other forest gardeners can follow in their own preferred way.

So this is a challenging and inspiring story for experienced, new and would-be forest gardeners and for anyone with a love of nature and a longing to engage with it on a deeper level.

A forest garden is a different garden which needs to be gardened differently by a different gardener.

Read more:

About the Author: 
Anni Kelsey

​Readership:

the garden of equal delights is written for anyone who is dreaming of, thinking of, planning or actually gardening in a forest garden.

But it also challenges our whole idea of what it is to be a human in nature and the way we understand the idea of 'gardening'.

That makes it a book for anyone awake in a climate and environmental emergency.
From a review by Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust, Dartington, UK:
"Anni Kelsey’s book treads where few forest gardening books have gone before: looking at the relation-ship between garden and gardener. What exactly should the forest gardener be trying to do? How does the garden teach and change us? I am impressed by her list of principles and especially enjoyed her list of non-activities to help let go of control and allow the garden and gardener freedom to develop."
From a review by Verona Barnes in Growing Green International:
"This is a very personal book, where the author combines her passion and reverence for the earth and nature itself with a desire to share what she has learned about the dynamics of forest gardening. This is not a handbook for creating a forest garden, but more of a companion book to find out how to be the gardener. ...
​This is... being a different gardener. The gardener is regarded as being less important than pollinating insects, after all the garden will survive if it is not tended, however if it is not pollinated it will die."
Read the full review
From a review by Dr Carole Kirk:
"The work of the forest gardener, the author suggests, shifts from traditional tasks of digging and weeding, to more observational ‘tasks’ of watching, waiting, and learning how the garden develops as an ecosystem.  She acknowledges that watching and waiting can be uncomfortable...  The gardener's job is to watch carefully as an ecosystem slowly develops that no longer requires pest management, weeding, or added fertility. 
Only once the forest gardener begins to understand this ecosystem, and the many interactions occurring within it, can they begin to gently intervene.  This is a patient, absorbed quality of watching with no agenda other than noticing what is going on. 
Anni Kelsey shows us how she evolved this gentle, watchful role in her own garden, and how she learned to delight in its complexity and abundance.  Her development of the gardener’s role into one of appreciation and humility brought her to a transformational understanding of her place in the world, and perhaps our place in the world.  Slowly, gently, the garden changed the gardener."
Extract from the book:
"Planning and planting a forest garden is just the very beginning of an interactive and co-creative engagement between forest garden and forest gardener. This co-creativity begins immediately after planting and continues ever after.
First, there is the everyday level of interacting with the forest garden to support it in creating and sustaining an ecosystem that will become healthy, fertile and abundant.

But there is a deeper level as well which is about how we habitually relate to the natural world. This is the story of the remaking of our human perceptions from a perspective of assumed and rightful dominance and control of nature to a place of humble, appreciative, thoughtful and sensitive integration with it. Therein are significant treasures that are not at all obvious from the outset."