gardens of delight

I have been blogging for eight years now – starting on 10 January 2011.  Since then there have been 191 posts!

thousands of flowers on the herbal edge

My original aim was to explore the world of perennial vegetables and to find out what I could about obtaining them, growing and eating them, hence the name for the blog – Annis perennial veggies.  It was always my aim to grow perennial vegetables in the context of a small forest garden as I explained in that first month of blogging.  In spring of 2014 my book Edible Perennial Gardening was published detailing what I had found out up to that point in time.

polyculture in summer

After this my focus changed from growing as many perennial vegetables as I could to the garden ecosystem as an integrated and functioning whole.  I had moved house and begun a new garden by then and had been presented with lots of different things to explore and understand.

fennel in rain

In time I gave my new garden the name ‘the garden of delights’ – for obvious reasons really – because there were so many things within it and about it that delighted me.

For the past two and a half years I have been concentrating on elucidating and describing principles that can be used as guidance for anyone with a forest garden, or indeed for anyone who would like to make their garden more of a functioning ecosystem.

elder in flower

I made an initial statement of these principles as they had then evolved in a blog post last spring. I have continued thinking and writing and am pleased to be able to say that last week I completed the manuscript of my second book which explores and explains these principles further.  There will be more news of this in due course.

bumble bees on germander

It feels like time for a change and today I am changing the name of this blog to ‘gardens of delight’ (although the name has changed the web address remains the same).  This is in recognition of both my gardens being ‘gardens of delight’ for me and in the hope of  many more gardens of delight in many more places in times to come.

ripening raspberries

Principle: Everything the forest gardener does takes full account of the whole of the forest garden ecosystem – what has happened, what is happening and what they intend for the future.