Gardening Like The Forest:
Designing the Ecological Landscape (Workshop)
NEXT SESSION TO BE ANNOUNCED
Gardening Like the Forest: Designing the Ecological Landscape invites you to reimagine your garden as a thriving ecosystem that nourishes both people and planet. Forest gardens draw inspiration from the patterns and resilience of natural woodlands, creating landscapes that provide food, medicine, and resources while enhancing biodiversity and soil health.
In this workshop you will explore how to design ecological landscapes that produce abundance year after year, integrating trees, shrubs, perennials, and groundcovers into systems that support one another. Learn how forest gardening principles can transform your yard into a forageable regenerative space that offers food, fuel, fibre, fodder, fertilizers, and medicine. Practical, visionary, and rooted in ecological wisdom, this workshop offers tools to create landscapes that are as beautiful as they are functional. Whether you are tending a backyard, homestead, or community project, you will gain inspiration and skills to grow in harmony with the natural world.
Healthy forests maintain, fertilize, and renew themselves naturally.
Ecosystem design involves replicating the structure and function of natural ecosystems in food and medicine-producing environments. This is achieved by creating guilds of plants, typically in the form of polycultures. Successful polycultures combine valuable plants to minimize competition, increase yields and reduce the gardener’s workload and external inputs such as water and fertilizer. The most exciting and challenging aspect of garden design is polyculture design, which follows a step-by-step process. This training program explores the detailed ecological theories and practical design techniques behind polyculture design through a series of exercises. Participants will observe, evaluate, and redesign perennial polycultures at The Living Centre.
A Forest Gardener’s Tool Kit
The Seven-Story Garden: Vegetation Layer
Design Processes 1: Overview, Goals, and Assessments
Design Processes 2: The Design Phase
Natural Patterns in the Garden
An Intimate Way of Guild-Building
The Polycultural Elements of Forest Gardening
Designing Plant Guilds and Perennial Polyculture
Management, Maintenance, and Co-evolution
Blueprinting Your Polyculture
“We only invented the word organic because we made things inorganic.
We only invented the word natural because we made things unnatural.
We only invented the word permaculture because we made agriculture.”
~Khang Kijarro Nguyen
Meet your instructor
Shantree Kacera
Shantree Kacera is a world-renowned author and teacher who has been co-directing The Living Centre Eco-Spiritual Education Sanctuary since 1983. He holds a doctorate in Nutritional Medicine and Herbalism and has dedicated his life to promoting integrative approaches to Ayurvedic Medicine, Living Nutrition, and Herbalism. Shantree, who is also an Elder Canadian Herbalist, is widely recognized for his expertise in these fields.
Shantree applies organic veganic forest gardening practices, featuring a unique circular medicinal-wheel forest garden on the 50-acre botanical sanctuary. He has over 50-years of experience working with soil ecology and growing organically.
