New book on timber gardening!

Interest in forest horticulture in Sweden sprout, the term appears in the media more often, Facebook groups Forest Garden Growers hive of activity, and not least by the amount of emails in my inbox, I notice that there are infinitely many questions about this exciting growing technology among the growing interest in the country. Although many answers will remain unanswered for many years to come, we have felt that it is time to collect the current state of knowledge about forest gardening in our climate. The more we are popping in and immerse ourselves in this exciting world now, the more knowledge we can build together and bring us closer to the dream of the edible landscape. The book is scheduled to come out in spring 2018. You can pre-order and at the same time help us to enable printing of the book by support our campaign on Kickstarter.

The book will include descriptions of around 150 various species of woody plants and at least a hundred herbs that work in large parts of the country. A list of the plants that will be featured in the book, you will find here. Plant Portraits are the backbone of the book, but we also put a lot of effort to provide a broad scientific background to cultivation technique and go through the land, water, Biodiversity, microclimate and not least ecological succession means and why it is so important to keep track of the forest horticulture. Even design section with everything from site analysis to design functional planted together have got a lot of space in the book. Plant portraits supplemented by a hands-on review of all the possible propagation techniques, so you can build a successful timber garden without being financially ruined.

Overall, we expect that the book will be around 450 pages thick, format 22×28 cm and amounts of fine images and hand-drawn illustrations. The contents are based largely on our own farming experience here in southern Dalarna, but we also traveled around in Sweden, Finland and the Baltic countries to visit interesting woodland gardens and interviewing farmers behind them. Plant Portraits is also based on hundreds of scientific publications and we can reveal now that there were a lot of surprises. Did you know that you are using schisandrabär can expect to be able to swim longer if you are at high altitude? Or that pimpernötens lactic flower buds are a delicacy in Georgia? Many photos of plants are taken in botanical gardens around Scandinavia and we have tried to sample the edible plants that we have included in the book. Only a few flavors we still lack, as asiminans (pawpaw) peculiar fruits and bisonbuskens sour berries.

The team behind this book is the same as that behind the "Perennial vegetables: discover, grow, enjoy”: Annevi Sjöberg and I stand for the lyrics and Daniel Larsson is responsible for the shape. Do you have questions, ideas or comments? Write this in the comment field, on Facebook or email us at skogstradgard@gmail.com.

Pre-order and support the printing of the book here!

Thanks for your help!