Have you ever tried growing a food forest before?
Tune in to the latest podcast for my conversation with Pippa Chapman – author, permaculture designer, forest gardener, artist and mother – to learn the best way to start forest gardening – as well as her simple process of writing a permaculture book.
We chat about how to create multiple layers on a small-scale to maximise your growing area, using polycultures and guilds for healthy, low-maintenance food. Pippa also shares how to use perennials for structure and for year-round food, and how to incorporate flowers for beauty, wildlife and for the kitchen – as well as her journey finding permaculture.
Based in Yorkshire, Pippa has been professionally gardening for over 30 years, but she’s been exploring nature since she was a little girl. In 2007, she left her job as Head Gardener on a private estate to take a year-long practical apprenticeship at RHS Harlow Carr. Then she discovered permaculture and everything changed!
In her (first) book, The Plant Lover’s Backyard Forest Garden, published by Permanent Publications, Pippa explores how to grow your own beautiful multilayered food forest in your own backyard.
She was introduced to forest gardening and permaculture and in 2010 set up a sustainable gardening business with her husband – Those Plant People.
She grows a wide variety of fruits, flowers, herbs and annual and perennial vegetables in her small backyard, creating a beautiful, edible and wildlife friendly space.
You can find her on Instagram and Youtube as well.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!
Or access it on any streaming platform HERE and through Youtube.
Read the full transcript:
Morag:
Hello and welcome to the show everyone! We’re here on Sensemaking in a Changing World and we’re continuing our Permaculture Writer’s Series with my guest today, Pippa Chapman from West Yorkshire. Pippa is the author of ‘A Plant Lover’s Backyard Food Forest’. I’m really excited to talk with her today about not only her love of plants, because that’s something I deeply share with people, but also the love of food forests, and a world in permaculture and permaculture writing. So welcome to the show Pippa! Thank you so much for joining us today.
Pippa:
Thanks for having me here.
Morag:
Maybe we could just begin with the description of your food forest, your forest garden – I tend to call them food forests! But a forest garden, in my mind, is kind of a similar thing. Do you see a distinction between that and could you describe what your first garden was where you are in your backyard?
Pippa:
Yeah, I think that’s quite a good place to start, actually, because quite often when I’m talking to people about what I do, I say that a food forest is a good description, because quite often forest gardening is a bit of a confusing term. But in terms of what I do, I tend to call it a forest garden because quite often the focus of what I’m doing is not always food. So you know, I think that’s quite an important distinction. I’ve done some which are sort of more healing medicinal forest gardens – I’ve just been designing a forest garden at a community garden that we’re setting up with Yorkshire water. And as part of that, we’ve created a teaching forest garden and each section is shaped in a circle, a bit like a mandala garden.
Each section has a different focus. So one focus is food. Another is medicinal healing plants. Another section is all about fibres for weaving and creating textiles and cordage and plants for natural dyeing. And another section is focused on habitat and wildlife as well. So yeah, I think food forests is a good term when you’re describing it to someone who’s new to the term forest gardening, because I think it explains it a lot better. But I tend to think of myself as creating forest gardens because it’s not always about food.
Morag:
I love that distinction. Because you’re right, it’s not all about the food. I mean, if you’re thinking from a human perspective and creating edible gardens through a permaculture lens, you tend to put food as the first thing. But as you say, there’s so many other benefits and purposes, as well as the purpose of being a wildlife or rewilding garden. I wonder whether it’s something to do with the fact that there’s, like Robert Hart and his forest garden, whether the UK movement has that terminology more in the culture of that gardening? Or do you have any thoughts on that?
Pippa:
I have noticed over the last few years, the term food forest creeping more into the UK. When I was writing my book, I was thinking, do I call it a forest garden or a food forest. But as I say, in the end, because quite often, I’m doing forest gardens that aren’t the sole focus isn’t food, I decided to go with forest gardening. Quite often, I use the term food forest as well, but it’s definitely starting to come into the UK more now.
Morag:
Oh, thank you for describing that. I really appreciate that distinction. I like the image that the term forest garden conjures up. I’m imagining wandering through this beautiful garden that is a forest in and of itself, rather than focusing on the food first, but thinking about the forest, the ecosystem, as being the main part of it.
So what cultivated in you in the very beginning a love of plants? You obviously have a deep relationship with the plant world. Where did that begin for you?
Pippa:
I’ve always enjoyed gardening. I remember when I was younger, my mom used to go out and potter around in the garden and I would love to go and help. I would take out my little dolls and we’d, you know, play fairies in and amongst the flowers and I just used to really love it.
The first bit of garden that I was given as a child I used to grow lupins and nettles. I think really just because they were the two things that grew well there! I used to always try and give my family nettle soup, which they weren’t always very happy about… But yeah, I think I’ve always liked being outdoors. I grew up in the Yorkshire Dales so I used to go out looking at wildflowers and drawing pictures of them, writing poems about them. So I’ve always really enjoyed the natural world.
But when I was at school, I think because I was naturally very good at drawing and painting and things like that. That was the direction in which I was sort of encouraged to go and when you’re at school, there isn’t horticulture on the menu. There was no option to study plants and gardening. So it just never occurred to me to go into that as a profession. I ended up sort of going off for a few years doing a degree in fine art, then really hating being indoors all the time in an art studio! I thought I would really love being in this amazing creative space, but I just wanted to be outdoors.
While I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I got a job in a garden centre. I was just really lucky that this particular garden centre had all sorts of weird and wonderful quirky plants. It wasn’t like your usual garden centre that’s mostly a pet shop, it was a proper plant nursery. And so I really got to know individual plants. They wouldn’t just have sort of one geranium, they would have 50 different types of geranium so you really could get to know the slight differences between the different plants. And I think that really set me up well for my plant knowledge, certainly, and all the botanical and Latin names for plants as well.
After a while, I just felt I wanted to actually garden with the plants, not just propagate them and sell them in the garden centre. So I got a job in a large private estate in Yorkshire. It was a beautiful large house with about five acres of garden which was fantastic. And even luckier, after a while they promoted me to head gardener, which was also fantastic. So I got my own cottage on site and it was just a beautiful place to live and so much to learn. And, you know, I had to do everything from rose pruning to gardening in the kitchen garden. It was fantastic.
But once again, I got to a point where I realised that even though I didn’t know very much, I was the most qualified person there. And therefore there would never really be the opportunity to learn more there. I just have always enjoyed learning and I felt I couldn’t stay there forever until I retired, it just wouldn’t suit me at all.
I was lucky enough to find that the Royal Horticultural Society does traineeships. And I’d live not far from Harlow Carr which is their northern garden in Harrogate. So I applied for a place and it was a bit of an odd move, because normally you would apply there as a sort of very beginner rather than coming from a head gardener position. But I think they could see my enthusiasm and how much I wanted to learn more. You know, I was the head gardener, but really, I wasn’t a very knowledgeable gardener. So yeah, they accepted me and it was a fantastic year.
It was a bit like an apprenticeship, really. So you got to go round each different department. One week I’d be working with alpine plants in the alpine house. The next week, I’d be in the woodland. The next week, I would be in the kitchen garden. Constantly moving around all these different departments and just soaking up so much knowledge. I used to go home and do further research for the evening and put together a massive diary of everything that I learned within that year. That was an absolutely amazing year of learning.
I think I was lucky that while certain elements of the RHS that still have quite old fashioned approaches to things, but at Harlow Carr they were very into sustainability and the environment and actually they did have plans, when I got there, to plant an acre of forest garden, which unfortunately never happened! Now it would have been a wonderful example of forest gardening to go and look around, but that never got planted. But it introduced me to the idea of forest gardening.
And it was whilst I was there that I was looking around the book shops, they had a fantastic bookshop, and I love reading. So I was having a little look around, and I came across an introduction to permaculture book! I had never heard of it before. Now it might have been, might have been Graham Burnett – I’ve still got it somewhere. But it’s been so long since I’ve read it. And as I was reading it, I just thought ‘this is exactly what I want to be doing’. This is how I want to approach my future career in horticulture. And it just made perfect sense. So that was sort of the beginning really, of my permaculture journey.
Morag:
Which bit about it appealed to you? Coming from that horticultural plant perspective, what drew you to the permaculture ideas?
Pippa:
I think it was the holistic approach to it all. In my previous job as Head Gardener, the clients had wanted bowling green lawns. So I’m there trying to plant flowers for pollinators. But at the same time, I’m pouring weed killer and moss killer all over the lawns. And I remember one day, which was really one of the final straw days, I decided ‘I just can’t do this anymore’. I was watering weed killer over clover. And a bee just flew on to a flower at the moment that I put this weed killer on and I just felt like, ‘No, I just, I can’t do this anymore, there must be another way!’ II think it’s just that feeling of a lot of gardening is very much how to control nature, how to work against nature. And it always felt wrong to me.
When I started reading about permaculture and about this holistic approach of how the garden is part of nature, how to work with that, how to make the best of a plant. Rather than ‘if you’ve got clover in your lawn, use weedkiller’, permaculture is doing loads of great things. Just having a totally different perspective on gardening.
Unfortunately, I never managed to convince the clients to leave their weeds in their lawns. But when we now take on clients, and they have weedy lawns, we explain the benefits. And we do have somebody who does insist on mowing a very large area of lawn, they are quite happy for the buttercups and the clover and all the other weeds to just stay in there. Which feels like a huge step forward.
Morag:
That’s fantastic, isn’t it? And so when you have clients, do you do design work as well as the maintenance work? How does your permaculture or forest gardening career look?
Pippa:
I think from everything that I learned when I was at the garden centre, I was really lucky that the person who owned the garden centre also ran a design and landscape business. And he was hoping that he would take me on as a garden design apprentice. So I did get a chance to learn quite a bit about garden design. But I did feel very quickly, even before I learned about permaculture, that I didn’t like just designing a garden, planting it and then never seeing it again – it didn’t really give me much satisfaction. And I didn’t feel that I was learning very much because how do I know what those designs turn into? How do I know how successful the planting design was? Because I never see it again.
So now I would say we manage and develop gardens. So I will take on a garden and usually it will develop and be redesigned slowly, rather than coming in and saying, ‘Oh, I’ve seen your garden for five minutes. Here’s what I think we should do. Get some bulldozers in and then plant it up. And that’s it.’ So yeah, I tend to say that we manage and develop gardens. I do some design work. But generally if somebody wants a design I say, why don’t I come and give you a consultation? And then during that consultation, we can discuss what their needs are, I can have an assessment of the site. And then usually whilst I’m there, I say, ‘I think it would be much better if you developed this garden slowly rather than just got rid of everything and redid it all at once’.
Morag:
So when you say that ‘we’, do you have a team?
Pippa:
Yeah! My husband, Andrew. We actually met while I was at Harlow Carr. We both share a love of plants. He’s a bit more sciency than me, so he’s got a sort of more botany and plant sciences background than I have. But yeah, it complements it quite well. I come from the more artistic side and he comes from all the plant sciences. So we have lots of fun!
Morag:
Oh, great! Isn’t it wonderful. I was going to ask you about your artistic side and how you’ve been able to weave that into your world of permaculture and garden management.
Pippa:
I think particularly when I first started with permaculture and learning about forest gardening, I felt that I had to leave behind all of my artistic ornamental stuff. I felt like everything had to be functional and edible and useful. And that there wasn’t a place for all of the beautiful plants. I think as my understanding of permaculture grew, I realised it’s just as much about people care and our relationship with the garden. So I started to bring more ornamental plants in and understood that, okay, maybe I don’t need a bit of willow woven edging around my bed, but maybe it gives me a lot of joy to make it and see it there! And that’s enough because that enhances my relationship with a garden.
The more that I enjoy being in my garden, the more beauty that I see in it, the more that I’m going to actually go out and garden in it. Once I discovered that, I think that’s where I had a light bulb moment and everything really came together.
I started to do a lot more forest gardening within some of the gardens that we manage because I could say, ‘I can make you a forest garden that will give you food, be low maintenance, and also be really beautiful’. And that’s what has always sold it to people. Before that I was saying, ‘well, you know, we can have some, a few fruit trees and a few shrubs and some edible plants’. And I think for a lot of people, it’s particularly when you have a really small garden, that they sort of say, ‘Well, what about my beautiful flowers? I want it to look nice.’
It was the same at home really, even though we’ve recently moved where we were before was five acres all together that we could garden on. Not that we did very much with most of it, just sort of rewilded it. But the area that I used the most was a very small yard, with just a few beds that was mostly paving.
To start with I just concentrated on edible plants and it was just green, it was very green! Not that there’s anything wrong with that but it did just feel lacking. You know, it wasn’t a really beautiful space and it wasn’t until I started to introduce some more ornamental flowers – both for pollinators, but also just plants that were more tropical plants – they were just beautiful plants that I love. That was when I really began to fall in love with our yard as a space to garden in.
On tours when people would come and look around, that would be the part of the site that they wanted to talk to me about the most, ‘oh, I’ve got a small garden like this, what’s this plant and how can I grow in my garden?’ And so that was really the start of what led to the book – just wanting to say to people forest gardening is about growing useful and edible plants. But don’t forget that they can be beautiful as well and you don’t need five acres to grow it, you can have it in a small corner of a small garden.
Morag:
So what does a forest garden look like in your part of the world? Can you describe what are some of the guilds or some of the diversity of different plants that you have in your garden? I’m calling you from Gubbi Gubbi country here in Queensland which is subtropical so I have an image of what a Yorkshire forest garden is like, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you what all the different plants are in it. I’d love a visual walk around!
Pippa:
I suppose there’s two different versions really, because I have a forest garden that we grow that’s very wild so it’s like a young British woodland with silver birch, alder and oak. But underneath that there are gooseberries and roses, and raspberries and mint, things like that. So it looks very wild, it still has grasses and docks and primroses and things like that growing within there. I really love that space. Because really, all we ever do is stream a path through it and throw the grass around some of the fruit bushes and that’s pretty much it.
I think we’ve occasionally gone in and taken out a tree as a silver birch, which was self seeded and got bigger and bigger- there were too many. But that’s really it, it’s like a young British woodland but with edible plants in it. And so that’s a lovely space, there’s even bluebells in there as well.
The gardens that do better in smaller spaces, you can’t be that wild – you know, one silver birch will take up the entire garden! So you have to have a completely different approach. I would say that the forest gardens, the small scale forest gardens that I do, look much more like a garden and it just happens that the plants in them are also edible and useful.
I have a guild where I have an edible Hawthorn, the wild ones that we have in this country are edible. So I would say a culinary one might be a better description – one with larger, tastier berries. And we’ve crown lifted that a bit so we can fit some other things underneath. So I use things like Taunton Dean kale, it’s one of my favourite kales. So I grow that a lot even though it’s got really tough, thick leaves, which the pests don’t like so much. Once you cook it, it’s just melt in the mouth and delicious, I use that quite a lot.
I’ve put blackcurrant and some raspberries under there as well. I don’t like to stake my raspberries, I don’t put any supports in but I will grow them in little groups and I would just tie them at the top with some string – like you would sort of obelisk and then they support themselves. Underneath that I’ve got some lemon balm and chives – some Good King Henry. In amongst that I’ve got some flowering plants as well like some salvias, some catmint, some pulmonarias which are flowering right now looking lovely, and even bulbs as well. I love crocus because they come up really early before anything else comes in and they don’t grow so big as to cause any problems to any of the other plants that are coming up.
Morag:
It’s really interesting. So many of the ones that you’re mentioning, except for the hawthorn, I have here too in my garden! Their range is really huge. I mean, obviously, they would probably grow differently with seasonal change. But, you know, we’ve got some crocus and the lemon balm and all of the different things like that you mentioned.
Pippa:
I think in particular, in West Yorkshire, more specifically the valley that I live in, it’s the light levels that we struggle with.
Morag:
I was just going to ask you about that because quite often people say when I talk about this concept of food forests, they say, ‘yeah, that’s all right where you are because you get so much light’. But I’m in such and such a place where the light levels are really low. How do you explain that to people and to encourage them to try this way of gardening when they are used to the notion that it needs to be sort of open and flattened, catching all the sun. So how do you define it?
Pippa:
I think I tend to just suggest that because I think people think the focus of forest gardens is always the trees and how many trees you can fit in your garden. But actually, by putting in lots of trees in the area, you really do limit what you can grow underneath. So I always try and say, ‘you know, be a bit sparing with the trees, plant them a bit further apart than you want, don’t try and squeeze in as many as you can. And then really concentrate on the understory, because you can grow so much in the shrub and herbaceous layers.’ So trying to make that more of a focus.
That tends to be how I garden – I’ll really space the trees out quite a bit. At the end of the day, there’s only so many apples that you’re going to eat! (laughs) Do you really need 10 apple trees? Or could you get away with two?
I think in areas where there are lower light levels, or maybe you’ve got a very shady garden, then really look at the understory plants that will grow quite happily in shade, like a blackcurrant growing under a ginormous Elaeagnus Maculata. It can survive with one hour of sunlight in the middle of summer and it still fruits really well. So I think, don’t assume everything has to be in full sun. But equally, don’t take away all of the sun because you’re so keen to get so many trees in.
Morag:
What about the management and the maintenance of a garden like this? Have you noticed that it actually simplifies the way that you garden in terms of the time and effort it takes to keep a garden looking good? Or still you find lots of management required?
Pippa:
I think that growing this way, we’ve always even in our purely ornamental borders, we’ve always had the same approach which is ‘put as many plants as you can in, you don’t want to see any soil and there will barely be any maintenance at all’. So around this time of year, February/March is when quite a lot of the weeds get going before the plants. You can get in there and take out anything you really don’t want. I mean in our wilder forest gardens, as I say, we don’t really do any maintenance at all. Nobody minds if there’s dandelions or docks or grass or anything.
But on a smaller scale, more ornamental forest gardens, I will go in at this kind of time of year, I will take out any weeds that I think will swamp out other plants. Then we will give a layer of mulch if needed. Quite often on a smaller scale, it’s harder to get that self-mulching, self-managing garden. We’ll go in, do a weed, do a mulch and then that’s pretty much it for the year other than going in and harvesting. So occasionally there’ll be a plant that’s just so happy where it is that starts to take over the garden! And so might have to go in and cut it right back and dig bits of it out.
You know, even in the middle of summer, there’s a lot of plants where you can go in and cut them right to the ground, give them a bit of mulch and water, and they’ll come back and give you another crop.
I would say mainly, it’s the harvesting and maintenance throughout the year. Really, just once a year I go in, do a bit of a weed and take out what I want. Do a bit of editing, if things need moving around, some things die, you know, even if you’ve put them in the right place and the right soil and the right level of sun or shade, you know, they’ll just die for no reason. So I do quite a bit of editing as well.
Morag:
I’ve never heard it called that. I love that, ‘editing;. Is that a horticultural term, is it?
Pippa:
I don’t know! I suppose, it’s just what I’ve always called it.
Morag:
I was going to ask you about the feed. I heard you saying you add a bit of mulch and water. But what about feeding? How do you keep the nutrient levels maintained in a garden like this? Do you find this enough nutrient cycling going in? Or do you add anything else in composts and other things?
Pippa:
I think a lot of that depends on what you’re planting and how heavily you’re cropping as well. I do try and add as many plants as possible that will add nutrition – so nitrogen fixing plants and things like comfrey.
Morag:
What are the nitrogen fixing plants in your area?
Pippa:
So there’s things like clovers and lupins and peas and beans, plants like that. A lot of which are really attractive as well as being edible. So they’re really nice additions, if you’re growing a lot of annuals in there as well and I was thinking, it doesn’t have to be purely perennial. Natural woodland doesn’t just have perennial plants in it, it has annuals and biennials as well. I think it’s really good to mix those in there as well. So if you’re cropping heavily with a lot of annuals, then you might need to bring in some extra feed. But really, we just bring that in the form of a mulch.
So I don’t go around liquid feeding or anything like that. If there’s something that’s really struggling, and just not looking very happy, I tend to take it out and replace it with something that will grow better in poor soil rather than forcing something to grow.
Morag:
Yeah, that’s a really interesting point, isn’t it? Often in gardens, we can tend to be really protective and push something along. Whereas you know, maybe the best thing is to think, ‘oh, maybe this is just not the right plant in this place’. Oh, that’s fantastic. So tell me more about your book. So firstly, how did you start? Are you a writer? How did you get to the point of going, ‘oh, I’ll write a book about this’? I’d love to hear a bit about your process of writing, too.
Pippa:
I definitely wasn’t a writer, wouldn’t have called myself a writer at all. I’m terrible at spelling as well, which has always put me off a bit. I think I just really wanted to share my learning. I wanted to share my approach. And I had done a couple of articles for the Permaculture Magazine. Just really along the same lines, I just had been doing something that I was really enjoying, I wanted to share that and Maddy Harland very kindly agreed to put my article in her magazine which was amazing because not being a writer, I didn’t know that I would ever be able to do that. So that was fantastic. And then I think I just got to the point where I thought, I’m ready to share my learning.
Now I want people to see that they can have forest gardens at home, that they don’t have to constantly be dreaming of buying a small holding or an acre of land or moving somewhere. That they can just do it now. And so I had a chat with Maddy about it. They agreed that it sounded like a great idea.
And I think I was one of the few people who actually locked down and got into the way of writing my book. So it was actually, because of lockdown. Because we have the gardening business, we could carry on working, we were able to keep going to work, so no furlough for me! And the kids were off school. So I was homeschooling, they didn’t take well at all to the idea of zoom lessons, they could not sit and concentrate on a screen. It just wasn’t happening.
So we basically homeschooled all of the time that they were out of school, which was loads of fun. We did all sorts of interesting environmental learning. That was lots of fun, but I didn’t get any writing done. (laughs) And so it wasn’t really until things had settled down again and they’d gone back to school that I could get working on it properly.
I would really encourage anybody listening to who has already done their permaculture design course to do a diploma and applied permaculture design. Because that really helped me to approach permaculture in a different way to really understand it on a completely different level. When I was doing my diploma, I was struggling with some of the design processes and how to use them to design better because I wasn’t just designing gardens, I was designing my livelihood, I was designing how I manage my home and family life. And so I actually did, as one of my designs in my portfolio, I did one called designing the design process. So I kind of unpicked all of the different design processes that are used in permaculture design and came up with one that worked really well for me.
And so when I was thinking about writing a book, I did a bit of a survey. I read some of the books that were my favourite ones on forest gardening. I tried to work out what gaps the word that didn’t quite answer the questions that I had. And I also identified the fact that I wasn’t a writer. So, you know, that might have been an issue. And also that I had no time in which to write a book.
Even after the kids went back to school and work calmed down a bit, I still work full time, have a busy family life and manage a garden at home as well. I decided that the only time in which I had to write really was little snippets of time. So most of the book was written in my van while my daughter was at running club. And it would be just under an hour of time that I would have. And so it’s very hard to focus when you just have this small space of time. I had to realise quite early on that I had to be very organised about it.
So I looked at the idea of pattern to detail. I broke everything down, I looked at what chapters I wanted to write. So before I wrote anything, I already had all of the chapters, the subheadings, and the general topic of each paragraph within those headings before I wrote anything. It meant that I could very easily drop my daughter off at running club, sit in the van, which was actually great, because I have no distractions at all, I just had my laptop and a coffee. And then I could just look through my list. And I could think, right, today, I’m going to do this paragraph, piece by piece.
When I finally got all those pieces together, I did take some chunks of time, so I could read through them and make sure that they made sense and that they flowed well. But yeah, it was a case of really using permaculture design, very rigidly to do the survey, analysis, design and then going through each stage. And that was the only way that I could make this book happen.
Morag:
Oh, that’s motivational! So many people say ‘I just simply don’t have time’, you know? What you’re describing is amazing.
Pippa:
I think that it’s just I think once you’ve decided that that’s what you want to do, then you have to just find a way to make it happen. Really, I could have easily just sat in the van and listened to a podcast or scrolled on Instagram or something like that. But it was really enjoyable as well. At the beginning, I just thought, well, I don’t even know if I’ll enjoy writing, I might really hate it. And actually, I discovered I really, really love it. I really enjoy it. And so I’m now starting to look at how I can do more writing as part of my poly-income.
Morag:
Another book?
Pippa:
Yes, yes, I’m already working on two, very slowly at the moment, because we just moved house. So that’s got in the way of things a bit. I’m looking at maybe writing for other gardening magazines. I’ve just joined the in the UK, we’ve got the garden media guild. I’ve just joined and had a few chats with people from that, which has been really interesting. So yeah, I feel like it’s opened up a whole, a whole new world of things.
Morag:
How long did it take you to from the moment you started mapping out your chapters until the book came out?
Pippa:
Yeah, I think probably it was about maybe a year and a half, something like that. But a lot of that time was spent being frustrated that I couldn’t write it because of lockdowns and everything. But I think once I really started working on it properly, it was probably about six months maybe of writing. I think because I’d spent so long thinking about it and scribbling the odd note, when I actually sat down to do the writing part, it came together really quickly.
Morag:
How did you organise your note taking?
Pippa:
In a not very organised way! just in a book randomly writing stuff down and I would try and write a big headline so that when I’m flicking through it later, I can see at the top of the page it would say, you know, ‘how to design polycultures and guilds’. So that I would know because I knew what my headings were, I would know that those notes would relate to that. When it came to writing each chapter, I could gather all my notes together.
Morag:
What about your illustrations?
Pippa:
I did take a lot of photographs. So my husband and I both really enjoy photography as well and because what I’ve written about is what we do, we had literally 1000s of photographs that I had to scroll through. So that actually took, possibly almost as long as writing the book, trying to get through all the photographs! One of the things that I did in lockdown with the kids was doing some lino cut printing. So we really enjoyed that. And I enjoyed it so much that I decided to incorporate some of those into the book as well. So there’s, there’s a few of my lino cuts in there as well which is really fun.
So I think that was really nice, too, that I had all of the photographs to illustrate what I was talking about, as well. It’s definitely a book that’s full of pictures. There’s a lot a lot in there. Which is really great. Because I think, you know, so often you can write about forest gardening and the theories, but actually to have some pictures, it’s really helpful
Morag:
So helpful, really helpful. That’s right, and also at a scale that makes sense to that backyard context that you’re talking about. Yeah, it’s fantastic. So I wonder, too, if you could just talk a little bit about the publishing process, and what happens when you’ve written your book, then what happens? Like, you know, it gets out into the world, and then you need to start to share it out into the world, talk about it. How’s that changed the work that you’re doing? Is the work you’re doing getting amplified by having the book? Like, how have you found things have changed because of being a published author now?
Pippa:
Yeah, I was so focused on getting the book written and on the book launch that I had not really thought enough about what happens after and all the work that I had to do to get the word out there – that I’d written it and that this book existed. So yeah, I think I really enjoy doing talks, and going & meeting people. But I hadn’t really thought about the fact that I should have been doing all of that before the book came out. So in my head, I had to think right, when the book comes out, you know, in September, then I will go out and get in touch with all of these people. But really, I should have been doing that beforehand. So that’s a learning for book number two. But yeah, it has been great.
Really, I just went through, well, what podcasts do I listen to? And then I asked other people, what podcasts do you listen to? Just talking to sustainable gardening groups and emailing people, agreeing to interview invites. You know, that’s been really fun. I’ve had some really great conversations. I’ve gone to talk to gardening groups. And sometimes, you know, you go along to these groups, and you wonder if they’re very traditional double digging, spraying everything with chemicals, kind of groups. But actually, it’s been really fantastic that, you know, loads of people come up and talk to me and buy books and say, ‘it’s really inspired them to change the way that they garden’. So I really enjoyed that.
It’s funny, really, I was thinking it seems odd, because I haven’t done anything differently in terms of my horticultural practices. I’m still doing the same work that I did before. But suddenly, people want to hear about what I have to say, because I’ve written a book, which, you know, is fantastic, because I think there’s so many people doing really amazing things that nobody knows about. And that if they could write about it, too, they could share that.
Morag:
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, there’s so many people in so many places doing something particular – like it could be their focus on how to address managing a woodland in a subtropical area, or it could be, how to manage a school garden in a highly urbanised area and working with the teachers. Each one of these different aspects or lenses of how we apply permaculture is so fascinating and I think it’d be wonderful to have more people that could step up.
So this is still part of why I’m doing this series on permaculture writers within this podcast because I’d love to encourage people who are listening to think ‘ah, actually, I suppose that’s something that I could do – she just said she wrote it in the car while her daughter was running!’ It is possible. Having people like Maddy and Tim with Permanent Publications you can pitch to them and work with them through actually getting something forward. And they’re really open to the idea of people putting forward really practical positive ideas and have specific knowledge that you can take and do something with. And I think that’s really, really wonderful.
Pippa:
Yeah, I think as someone who is not a writer, and who has never done writing before, they made the whole process such a joy. It was really such a wonderful process. And I have spoken to quite a few people since, they’ve been saying, ‘Oh, I just wouldn’t know where to start with writing a book’. And I explain my process and breaking it down into small chunks so it seems less daunting, because I can’t imagine just sitting down with just a blank screen and just starting on, ‘right, this is me, starting the book’, I don’t think I would have ever gotten started because that’s way too daunting.
But I think if you just start brainstorming chapter titles and breaking those chapter titles into smaller titles, suddenly you realise that you’ve got the framework of a book and you just have to fill in the gaps. And I think that makes it so much more accessible. For people who don’t have a background in writing to get started.
Morag:
Did you have a writing mentor? Like as you’re going through, someone you could bounce ideas around with to see if you’re on track, or you just kept going and felt like you’d gotten your own groove?
Pippa:
Yeah, I wrote a couple of chapters. And then after I’d written those, I was feeling a bit nervous about whether I was on the right track. So I sent them off to Maddie to have a read through and her editor as well. They gave some really great feedback, which was really fantastic, because I think sometimes you forget who your audience is as well and you can lose focus a bit. And you’re trying to sound knowledgeable and use all the right terminology. But at the same time, if you’re trying to write for beginners then that doesn’t always really fit very well. So they gave me some great advice on keeping on track with who I was writing the book for.
And then I had a great friend, Chris, and because as I said, my spelling and my grammar is really terrible, I would give her my draft chapter and then she would go through and just say, ‘I think you need to explain this a bit more. It doesn’t make sense, or move this sentence around’. Or, you know, there was one chapter where she said, I think you need to make this into two chapters. You’re trying to fit too much into one, I think you need to split it. So yeah, I had some great people to help me along the way.
Morag:
That’s so helpful to have someone like that, who can just sit down really calmly, and just give that really clear feedback. How did you find your voice, your writing voice? Did you try a few different ways of writing first and then kind of landed like ‘Oh, this feels more natural’? Or did you just start?
Pippa:
I think I just started. I just wrote what was in my head really, it just kind of came out. Occasionally I would read bits back that I would think, ‘Oh, that sounds really boring’. Usually it was because I’d got so bogged down in explaining a technique or something that I was trying to sound really prescriptive. ‘And this is how you do it’. ‘And this is how many centimetres apart this has to be’. So sometimes I would read it back and think ‘I need to rewrite that bit to be as if I was chatting with someone’ and just saying, ‘Oh, actually, I do it like this. And you can do it like that’. Yeah, it was mostly just what was in my head.
Morag:
But I think what you just said then is a really lovely thing. It’s like, it’s your voice. As you’re chatting to someone, imagine you’re taking someone on a tour through your garden and explain that. You’re saying about how you were taking people in the garden, and they were interested in that. So is that kind of the way that you explain? So imagine you are in the garden with people and sharing out the knowledge of my as you would explain it in a class setting?
Pippa:
Yes, I think that’s very much how I wanted it to be – not a book saying you must do this, or you must do that or forest gardens must have seven layers. You know, I think very early on I said, ‘Well, we can’t have big trees in a forest garden. So we’ll just have six layers and that’s fine’. And sometimes you might just not want any shrubs in there. That’s fine.
You know, I just think sometimes books can be off-putting to people, because there’re so many rules, and there’re so many correct ways to do things. And if you’re not wanting to do it that way, or the book is so prescriptive that you feel you’re never going to be able to live up to that, I think it just puts people off. And I think my approach has always been, this is what I do and if you want to do that too, then this is how to do it. But equally, you might want to do it in your own way.
Morag:
And I think just having all the different examples so that you can show like ‘this is our approach, and this is what we’ve been doing, this is what’s working well’. Just giving people options to adapt and localise. I think that’s really encouraging and really offering people a great place to begin, because it is a bit of a paradigm shift, isn’t it? From a traditional way of gardening to a forest gardening approach. And by weaving in all the things that you’re saying, like the beauty and the people care, as also being part of the rewilding movement.
All of those different things come together, there’s so many different reasons why you’d want to do that. So it sounds fantastic. Are you running workshops and courses? Do you weave in your sort of education? Do you have an education hat that you offer? I know you said you’re doing talks around different places, but do you invite people into gardens and teach forest gardening courses?
Pippa:
We were doing quite a bit of teaching at our previous place. And we did run a few forest garden courses, but we’ve recently moved and currently our garden is just flat with nothing in it. So I’m not going to be running any tours on courses here for a while. But at some of the other gardens that I work in, I do manage the garden for the Ecology Building Society, which is nearby. And so we’re just about to start doing some tours there.
So it has elements of a forest garden and it’s also a permaculture garden. And then there’s a garden that I manage near Bradford which is quite a new community garden as part of a Yorkshire Water project. And so I’m going to be running an introduction to forest gardens there. So it’s quite a young forest garden. We just planted it up this winter. So we’re going to be having some tours there.
Morag:
I heard you say there’s a forest garden and a permaculture garden, in my mind they’re kind of like the same thing. What is the difference in your mind?
Pippa:
Well, there’s areas where the focus isn’t food. So there’s areas that are sort of borders for pollinators, there’s areas which are mainly for habitat. Particularly because it’s the ecology building society, there’s a lot of focus on looking at the ecology and soil health and habitat and things like that. There are parts within it, where it’s a layered food system. And then there are other parts where it’s a gravel garden with plants that will grow well and gravel. And so I wouldn’t say it’s all forest garden, but it’s a permaculture garden, which has bits of forest garden within it, but so many other interesting habitats and different ecosystems within it as well.
Morag:
Sounds amazing. If anyone’s listening here in West Yorkshire, it sounds like you should go and have a look! So where can people find your Instagram? I think you have a YouTube channel as well? Do you want to tell us how people can get involved?
Pippa:
Yeah, so I started my Instagram page partly just for promoting my book, but actually I found that I really love going on there. It’s fantastic, I love sharing what I do. I mean, I take loads of photographs anyway. So in that respect, it’s not really changed – it just happens I’m sharing them instead of them sitting on my usual phone.
Morag:
Do you have a proper camera?
Pippa:
We now use my phone, I use my phone but I bought one that specifically was really good for taking pictures – so it takes time lapse video and all sorts of other things that work really well for what I need so I’m on Instagram – @pippachapman_thoseplantpeople. That’s the name of our business as well. And we also have a YouTube channel that we did quite a bit a few years ago, although recently it’s been a very long process moving house. That kind of took our focus away from making videos a bit and also our internet connection at our previous house was absolutely terrible. And it got to the point where we actually couldn’t upload videos. It just wouldn’t happen.
So we’re actually really excited that now we’ve moved house, we’ve got really amazing broadband. We can now upload things in minutes. So we’ve just been doing some filming recently. I’m also going to start doing a few videos from the Ecology Building Society garden and also from the actual whole garden. There are some videos on there that are still very relevant around things like everything from woodchip to perennial kales, things like that. But we’re just about to start a series of videos all about going from a completely flat rectangle and right from the start the whole design process and building the forest.
Morag:
That’s such a great thing to show because if other people are starting, where do you start? If you start with a garden that’s already well established but are curious with what happened in all the bits before… So that’s great.
We’ll put in all the links below to to where people can get your book, links to your website, links to your Instagram and links to your YouTube. If you’re interested in following through and seeing what Pippa’s been doing, go down below and you’ll see all of that information there.
Thank you so much for joining me today! It’s been an absolute delight, hearing about your work, your writing process, your love of forest gardening and just exploring a bit about what it means in your context. And I can just imagine walking through those beautiful food forests with all the colour and texture, it’s just wonderful. So thank you so much Pippa and good luck with writing your second book! That’s so exciting! Already onto the next one – not even taking a break, just keeping on going!
Pippa:
Yeah, definitely! Well, thanks for having me on, it’s been a real pleasure chatting. Thank you!