Emma Cooper

When I was talking about UK Forest Gardens during my blog post challenge, I mentioned that I was going to visit Penrhos, the permaculture smallholding in Wales that was featured in Rebecca Hosking’s ‘A Farm for the Future’ documentary. In fact, I recently spent a long weekend in North Wales with Carl Legge and his lovely wife Debs, and saw three permaculture smallholdings. (A smallholding is like a homestead, a small farm devoted to subsistence farming.)

Penrhos was first. It’s a working smallholding, and not open to the general public, but it’s possible to book a tour, which is what we did. (The details are on the website.)

Chris Dixon is a well-read, thoughtful and endlessly patient man. He starts the tour in the wilderness area (Zone 5, in permaculture terminology) of the smallholding. Penrhos is in a forest clearing, and was originally entirely given over to sheep pasture. When Chris and his wife moved in, this area was left almost to its own devices, and Chris treats it as an educational area – watching what the landscape does.

He watched as pioneer plants arrived from the margins and from seeds brought in by birds and the wind, and took over from the grass. He watched as tree seedlings took root, and saw that the ones protected by gorse or bracken were the ones that survived to adulthood. Early on Chris planted some fruiting shrubs, and these cropped well until the tree canopy filled out and reduced the light levels. Now ferns, mosses and lichens have been added to the mix and the bird population has thrived.

Chris does harvest timber for building and fuel, and brush that is of no other use is bundled into fascines, which are used as edgings for paths and to shore up slopes. They are strong, but allow water to filter slowly through and Chris has used them to turn a boggy patch into a wetland with fascine causeways for access:

The wetland is home to useful and edible plants, many of which (such as brambles) have rooted into the fascine walls, even where their roots are entirely submerged. When there is heavy rain, the fascines let water through slowly, preventing flooding downstream. But because they are not solid walls, they don’t suffer the damage that dam walls do if water spills over the top.

November is not the time to visit gardens in Wales, and indeed many of the outdoor tourist attractions shut at the end of October. And so Chris’ vegetable patch wasn’t pretty or impressive, although it was still productive. Having allowed several parsnips to flower and self-seed once, he now does it ever year – the self-seeded parsnips being much bigger, without the hassle of waiting for ever for the seed to germinate!

These thimbleberries were another revelation of slow food – according to Chris the berries weren’t at all tasty in the first couple of years. But he allowed the bushes to remain, and now that they are older their flavour has improved along with the yield.

Inside the polytunnel, this beauty caught my eye:

I forgot to ask Chris what it was – he was off making a cup of tea to bring our visit to a close. But according to Owen it’s anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum). It’s funny how plants come to your attention – this one is mentioned in The Thrifty Forager as a substitute for aniseed, and I will try and make room for it in the garden next year.

Chris’ approach to his smallholding is to take the long view, and spending a couple of hours with him is fascinating and I would thoroughly recommend it if you’re going to be in the area. He talks about water management differently to most farmers and gardeners. He weaves water in and around his smallholding, trying to hold on to it and its energy for as long as possible – rather than trying to get it to drain away as quickly as possible.

Although gardeners don’t suffer greatly from the modern need for instant gratification, we still have a tendency to step in when we see a ‘problem’ and look for a solution. Chris’ approach is to step back and see what happens, to tweak and nudge the natural progression to achieve a productive landscape. To really go with the flow of nature, and thereby let nature do all the hard work. I can’t imagine most of us would have the patience to follow his approach, but he had inspired me to do a bit less and look a bit more :)