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About this book
Customer reviews
Biography
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About this book
Learn about the incredible range of useful shrubs for many different situations, large and small. World-renowned expert, Martin Crawford, includes common fruit bushes like currants and gooseberries, and many other less-known shrubs with edible fruits, nuts, leaves, or other parts. He takes us on a journey into the world of exotic spice trees, shrubs with medicinal parts, and plants that fix nitrogen to help fertilise other plants. All these can be grown in temperate climates, diversifying our diets, enabling us to design beautiful, productive gardens, as well as showing us how we can integrate agroforestry into our smallholdings and farms to create new income streams. Despite increasingly urgent calls from scientists, the not-fit-for-purpose economic and political systems we live in cannot be relied upon to implement the carbon emission reductions needed. This is where we come into it: Whether we are farmers, gardeners or plant dabblers, by planting shrubby plants that sequester carbon, we can minimise our carbon footprint and ideally live a carbon-negative life. On a broad scale, perennial and woody species are the way forward to reducing carbon emissions in agriculture. Woody crops sequester carbon in their biomass, but can also be grown in systems which allow for the sequestration of large amounts of carbon into the soil.
Customer Reviews
Biography
After several years working in organic agriculture and horticulture, Martin Crawford founded the Agroforestry Research Trust in 1992. Since then he has focused on researching and growing perennial food systems including forest gardens and orchards of nut trees and uncommon fruits. He runs the nursery at ART which propagates and sells many different tree and perennial plants and is the author of Creating a Forest Garden; Trees for Gardens, Orchards, and Permaculture; and other books on ecological gardening.
Handbook / Manual
By: Martin Crawford(Author)
234 pages, colour photos, colour tables
"This book, like Martin's previous books, is brilliantly clear and comprehensive, a testament to his years of extensive research. The shrub layer can often get a little lost between the planning of the canopy and ground cover layers, and become a 'soft fruit' layer by default. Martin's ongoing search for useful plants that will thrive in our climate presents us with a list which increases the potential for this intermediate layer, and for perennial systems as a whole to meet our human needs – food, materials, medicines, etc while also meeting the needs of the ecosystem which supports us. This book will be particularly useful for those wanting a forest garden on a small domestic scale who may not have space for trees, and is a great resource for all forest garden designers."
– Caroline Aitken, Director of Whitefield Permaculture. Co-author of Food from your Forest Garden
"What if every time we planted a tree or a shrub, we planted one that yielded a crop of some kind? What if we lived in a world of delicious edible diversity? What if we knew, loved and recognised the diversity of edible and useful shrubs best suited to temperate climes? Martin Crawford, the living, breathing, walking encyclopedia of all that is perennial and delicious, is absolutely your best guide into this world of edible shrubs. You will never look at a gap in your garden in the same way again."
– Rob Hopkins Transition Network cofounder and author of From What Is to What If
"I've been inspired by Martin's pioneering work for twenty years, and his new book places much of his wisdom in our hands. Focusing on beautifully diverse shrubs – from American allspice to Yellowhorn - this book shows us how to enrich our patch and be part of a people-driven response to climate change in the process. Beautifully designed, thorough and fascinating, this is an essential for climate-minded gardener wanting to grow delicious, useful perennials at any scale."
– Mark Diacono, writer, author and grower
