The Process
The Forest Gardening Diploma Process
An ecological garden is designed to benefit humans and the surrounding, interwoven natural world. We aim to enhance nature’s ways, with our strategy to ‘work with nature’ rather than against her. We choose techniques that rebuild soil and nutrients rather than disrupt soil communities, and we carefully select diverse plant communities to be self-reliant, self-maintaining, and self-renewing. The ultimate goal is to establish a garden in harmony with nature’s patterns, resulting in a landscape that requires less maintenance.
To qualify for the Forest Gardening Educator’s Diploma course, the following pre-requisites must be completed:
* Completion of our Forest Gardening Correspondence Course
* Completion of our Forest Gardening Mentorship & through an ecological process.
The Forest Gardening Diploma Process is divided into three parts:
Part 1: Correspondence Course
The correspondence course comes with an approach Adobe DVD Reader and textbooks with the essential material to provide you with the information and instruction needed to become a Forest Gardening Educator.
The textbooks you will receive will be reference books from forest gardening and ecology leaders as essential parts of your study. After completing each section, you will be asked to submit the lesson and assignment for review and feedback.
After completing the correspondence course and mentorship program, you will be asked to write a thesis paper and research project to evaluate your competence and the practices and principles of Forest Gardening. The estimated time for completion of the course is one to two years.
Part 2: Completion of the Mentorship Program
Completion of our Forest Gardening Mentorship Program
The Mentorship will be available approximately one 3-day training weekend each year from early spring to late fall, plus our Living the Experience 7-Day Immersion. See our Forest Gardening Mentorship Program for dates
Part 3: The Completion of a Thesis & Research Project
This includes Six One-to-One Tutorial Sessions
The One-to-One Tutorial Sessions are offered as an essential aspect of this course to both support and guide you in deepening your advanced ecological studies. You pick a specific topic/aspect of forest garden design that you want to understand and articulate as a written thesis and a research project you can offer to your community.
Upon completing this uniquely designed educational process, you can become a Forest Garden Designer and Educator. As a certified instructor, your relationship with The Living Arts Institute will be of the network of teachers.
Course Hours
This 420-hour diploma course will consist of instruction in core forest gardens subjects such as a local plant materia medica, designing wholesome, dynamic, and resilient ecosystems using temperate forests as models; the site walks, experiential exercises to help you understand how the architecture, social structure, underground economics, and successional processes of natural forests apply in the design of edible ecosystems of all kinds, plant botany, field studies, plant identification, and ecosystem ecology. You will be inspired and empowered to design food forests for yourself, your friends, and your local community.
130 Mentorship Classroom and Hands-On Hours in our Forest Gardening 3-Day training weekends, Living the Experience: 7-Day Intensive, Local Wild Living Design workshop, plus a two-day graduation weekend.
120 Correspondence Course Study Hours
150 Thesis and Research Hours
15 Field Study Hours
5 One-on-One Tutorial Hours
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420 Total Hours
“By learning, you will teach; by teaching, you will understand.”
~Latin Proverb
