Forest Gardens: a UN World Restoration Flagship empowering rural farmers for scalable impact

Busoga 2 - midway through the project

Our first impression upon arriving at our first Forest Garden was the warm welcome with which the farmers greeted us. This was our first sign that the programme was delivering real benefits to local people. This passion for the programme continued throughout our visit, with every farmer keen to tell us how their Forest Garden was helping them and their family. Restoration here isn’t theoretical, it’s practical, productive, and profoundly human.

The first set of Forest Gardens we visited were within the Busoga 2 project, so the Forest Gardens were halfway through the 4-year programme. Despite having 2 years to go before the farmers in this project graduated, the land was already well on its way to being transformed. What was once mostly bare soil, with few crops growing and very little wildlife, was already a mosaic of permagarden beds, intercropping, alley cropping, fruit trees and more, with the all-important green wall growing around the perimeter of each Forest Garden.

The living fence (another name for the green wall of trees growing around the perimeter) provided us with much-appreciated shade from the intense sun, and then shelter from the torrential rain on a day of very mixed weather! We were told that there had been no rain for a week, and that we had brought good luck, in the form of the rain, with us. The lack of rain clearly demonstrated the importance of the groundworks dug by the farmers throughout their Forest Gardens to capture and hold water, so that the increasingly intermittent rainfall (due to climate change) has a reduced impact on their crops.

Farmers described to us how the Forest Garden approach has transformed not just their land, but their livelihoods. Multiple generations within families are now working together to grow a nutritious variety of food year-round. We also met farmers who are single mothers - they told us that they are now better able to feed their own children, but that they also sell additional produce at market and use the money to send their children to school. 

Mount Elgon 5 - completed project

Then, we travelled to the Mount Elgon 5 project that we have supported since 2021. Here, farmers have graduated from their 4-year programme, and we were able to see what Forest Gardens look like at the end of that period. What was most striking was how different each Forest Garden was. With every farmer able to design their own Forest Garden, planting the crops they choose in the layout they want, exploring each Forest Garden is an adventure - you never know what you’ll find around the next corner! Here too, the farmers were incredibly passionate about the programme and their Forest Gardens. 

The model has some excellent circularity to it too; even within 2 years, farmers are harvesting seeds from the Calliandra and Leucaena trees that make up their green walls, and selling the seeds back to Trees for the Future to be germinated and the seedlings distributed to other nearby farmers. This is providing another income stream for farmers, and incentivises long-term stewardship of these trees.

And the Forest Gardens aren’t just providing benefits to people - they’re great for biodiversity too. In Mount Elgon 5 surveys have recently identified 175 species of bees living within Forest Gardens, many of which rely on the pollen-rich flowers of the green wall tree species. Reptiles including snakes have been found taking shade under the foliage too, and new bioacoustic monitoring at other Forest Garden projects is revealing an astounding uptick in birds, amphibians and insects.