The Medicinal Forest Garden Handbook: Growing, Harvesting and Using Healing Trees and Shrubs in a Temperate Climate

Practical information on growing, harvesting and using medicinal trees and shrubs sustainably in a temperate climate, whether for self-sufficiency or profit

The author draws on her direct experience of creating a medicinal forest garden in the UK to provide supplies for herbal medicine in practice. She provides advice on the design of new planting projects which can meet the needs of different users from small gardens to smallholdings and agroforestry.

Includes:

• How medicinal trees can contribute to health and the environment
• Practical advice on designing with medicinal trees and shrubs using permaculture principles, as well as their propagation and establishment
• Combinations of woody and other layers of medicinal plants suitable for creating a medicinal forest garden or inclusion in other growing projects
• Management for a sustainable harvest including coppicing and pollarding of medicinal trees and shrubs
• Key medicinal constituents of woody plants and research studies into their effects
• How to harvest and preserve products from medicinal trees and shrubs effectively
• Recipes for making a range of herbal health care products
• Detailed monographs on medicinal trees and shrubs, providing fully referenced information about their medicinal potential and uses, alongside cultivation and harvest details.

Anne Stobart is an experienced consultant medical herbalist and herb grower and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. She is co-founder of Holt Wood Herbs, where she has transformed a conifer plantation into a medicinal forest garden. Anne has worked extensively in education, including leading a professional herbal medicine programme at Middlesex University in London, UK.