Sustainable gardening: How to make your garden a multilayer food forest

Tom Massey promotes natural ‘forest gardens’ with biodiverse planting to create wildlife havens

RHS Resilient Garden by Tom Massey: Forest gardens have plant types of varying heights and are a good use for small plots because you are gardening from high areas to low. They support more wildlife as there are varying habitats and the planting is dense

Your garden should have many layers, like a rainforest, to perform for biodiversity and climate, a leading garden designer says.

Tom Massey, an award-winning horticulturist, said most gardens only have a couple of layers, with a mown lawn, some bushes and perhaps a tree. But adding multiple layers, with intermingled planting, helps to mimic what one may find in a biodiverse forest, with each layer giving benefits for wildlife.