It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest
By Clare Leschin-Hoar

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Forget meadows. The city’s new park will be filled with edible plants, and everything from pears to herbs will be free for the taking.

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.

The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. Not only is this forest Seattle’s first large-scale permaculture project, but it’s also believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.

“The concept means we consider the soils, companion plants, insects, bugs—everything will be mutually beneficial to each other,” says Harrison.

That the plan came together at all is remarkable on its own. What started as a group project for a permaculture design course ended up as a textbook example of community outreach gone right.

“Friends of the Food Forest undertook heroic outreach efforts to secure neighborhood support. The team mailed over 6,000 postcards in five different languages, tabled at events and fairs, and posted fliers,” writes Robert Mellinger for Crosscut.

Neighborhood input was so valued by the organizers, they even used translators to help Chinese residents have a voice in the planning.

So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes?

“Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way—if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”

From the Congress website:

“The aim of EUROGARD VI is to bring together best practices and theory in order to:

• Promote effective action by botanic gardens for plant conservation.
• Strengthen the links between botanic gardens, research institutes, conservation networks and other stakeholders.
• Enhance botanic gardens as centres for sustainability, human well-being, environmental awareness and protection.

The United Nations has declared this decade, 2011-2020, the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity. This Congress will provide an opportunity for botanic gardens to demonstrate their contributions to this important international initiative. A key then of the congress will be incorporating theory into practice and presentations will show case approaches, tools and research that help us to confront the challenges of biodiversity loss in a changing world. Mitigation methods concerning in situ and ex situ conservation actions will be presented, as well as, effective networking practices that allow us to respond efficiently to the challenging targets of the European and Global Strategies for Plant Conservation.

The Congress will also aim to highlight the important relationships that exist between people and plants, and through this, link the work of botanic gardens to the achievement of the all important Millennium Development Goals.”

“BGCI launches advanced search facility for GardenSearch. Unique online access to data on more than 3,000 botanical institutions worldwide is now available through BGCI’s new advanced GardenSearch function, demonstrating the collective conservation and research resources available within the global botanic garden community.”

With this easy-to-use mapping tool (click link) you can search the world by country for Botanic Gardens. More information here.