- Five years ago,
we visited Robyn and Robert Guyton's beautiful
23-year-old food forest.
And ever since then
we've been excited about the food forest model.
- The film that came out of that visit
is one of our favorites,
and judging by the comments that keep coming in,
it's also one of yours.
- This inspired us
to recently travel back to upper Riverton
to visit the Guyton's
and see their now 28-year-old forest
and see how the forest
and the people living there have evolved.
- [Antoinette] We highly recommend you watch that first film
"An Invitation for Wildness"
before watching this one.
You can find the link for it in the description below.
- And we wanted to say huge thank you
to our supporters on Open Collective and Patreon
for making this production happen.
- Enjoy the film.
(birds chirping)
(serene instrumental music)
(bee buzzing)
(music continues)
- Pre-COVID we were getting people arriving here
from overseas having seen your first movie
and being so affected by it
that they would literally travel from India,
the footsteps of the Himalayas,
or from the States, or Europe to come and have a look.
Which was very flattering for us.
(gentle guitar instrumental)
- We had to start having forest garden tours
because so many people came just turning up at our door.
And for me, it's really, really rewarding
because people were wanting to do one,
and for them to come to the South Island,
and which as a place is quite hard to grow other things,
and to see it happen here, it gives people inspiration.
If the Guyton's can do it in Riverton,
we can do it anywhere in New Zealand,
or anywhere around the world.
(calming instrumental music)
- The film has been a real boon to us actually.
And quite a nice time marker too,
so now we can look and say,
"Oh, it was like that then,"
or "We were like that then,"
or "We thought like that,"
and that's changed over the past five years.
(calming instrumental music)
The forest has aged gracefully like I have.
(laughs)
It's also become wilder, wilder in appearance.
I guess that's a bit like me as well.
It was not an easy thing to do, as a matter of fact.
When we began, we had certain objectives
about what the forest garden might be,
and a lot of those were around food production.
(birds chirping)
As time's gone by, we've been balancing up my need
to really push the limits
and see what a forest can be like,
but also Robyn's need to be fed from the forest.
You know, for for it to produce enough
to be able to justify it, really.
(birds chirping)
- So over the last few years,
we've really been able to focus on the under story,
because at the start we had a lot of grass,
and once we had the wild gerbil going through
suddenly we had space to put things.
It's amazing how many fruit trees you can fit in,
I kept finding new ones, and finding spots.
And so the more complex it gets,
the more room is for other things.
(birds chirping)
I really like it being wilder.
And I know not everyone would like it quite this wild,
but it's really good to say,
"well, this is a, you know,
extreme example of forest gardening."
(birds chirping)
When it's wilder, there's less we have to do.
I'm pretty much harvesting and enjoying it.
I don't have to do anything else.
(birds chirping)
(foliage rustling)
Sometimes a tree gets too big,
but we just harvest a couple of branches off
and it's firewood.
(wood clatters)
We're getting older, you know, I'm over 60 now.
And so, it's nice not to have to worry
about keeping the edges tidy, or that kind of stuff.
And so we can kinda relax already.
(Robyn chuckles)
Becoming part of the forest.
(calm guitar instrumental)
(bird chirping)
- With a backdrop of a garden like this,
which is very secure now, it'll tick over.
There's not so much that's demanding of me.
I feel I can now start to be more creative
and more inventive in the way that an artist might,
especially now that we have a large tunnel house.
I can grow things in there, which I thought I never would.
For example, banana, or passion fruit,
or guava, and all these different plants
that grow further north out of doors,
but certainly don't grow down here in Southland.
So that's very exciting,
cause they bring in a new focus to the garden.
And the other one is trees.
I've always been a lover of trees,
but now I'm thinking
"how can I be more useful to the wider community
with my tree growing?"
I can really just grow trees here so easily
that I need to give them away.
And with an overabundance of plants
means they're going somewhere.
They're going to other people
and they're planting them elsewhere.
I would call it a natural process,
the way the gardens beyond the limits
of just this piece of land here.
(calming instrumental)
Something happens to your nature
when you're living in a forest garden
or in a woodland like this.
- Cool, and now some rhubarb?
- Rhubarb.
It's a relationship thing between the people living here
and the forest itself.
I think the two things happen together.
We literally are both maturing at the same rate,
or in coordination with each other in a way.
It's very interesting from my point of view,
because it's changed the way I think
about how the world works,
and it's made me feel incredibly enthusiastic
about the idea that the forest garden model
is one of the main models
that could be employed by humankind
in order to regain our proper balance in the world.
A human being, I think, is an integral part
of not only the forest garden,
but all of the forests on the planet now.
And I think that when we assume that role,
we'll be loved by, you know,
the other beings on the planet,
the other entities.
Especially by forests,
I don't think we're particularly loved at the moment.
Our behavior's not been very exemplary.
(Robert speaking indistinctly)
(birds chirping)
Our opportunity in terms of being forest managers
is extraordinary, I'm most excited by that.
That kind of expensiveness,
and the ideas that come from living in an environment
that's generous really has an effect
on the wider community.
And that's a lot to do with food security,
and food availability,
and connectivity between communities and people.
Those things, I think they emanate
from a garden like this
because that's how it works with the plants.
(calming music)
- I've got a new project since you were here last
and it's called the Longwood Loop.
We have a mountain range,
or a hill really, called the Longwood Mountains,
and it's the old trading reach around it.
I realized that 80% of their food isn't great in Southland,
and so we are incredibly vulnerable.
I decided that I would way sooner
buy off of local people.
Once a week, all the producers and growers
around this 165 Ks put up what they've got available,
how many dozen eggs, cheese, mushrooms, vegetables,
and then Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday,
an online farmer's market's open,
and people can buy off anyone around the whole loop,
and put in their shopping cart.
And then on Thursday, a little electric van hums away,
and goes to trading posts.
Every town's got a place where we stop
and put all the food out for people to pick up,
and it means that people meet each other.
And they really enjoy that,
people wanted to buy fresher food,
than go into the supermarket,
which is 80 or 100 Ks away for them, and then back.
They don't meet their neighbors.
- There's a couple of our new jams.
- Oh, (indistinct).
And we worked out that if just 20% of rural New Zealand
spent 20% of their grocery bill locally,
with other rural people,
1.5 million dollars a week would go back
to rural New Zealand.
I'll see you next week.
- All right.
- Yeah, have a good one!
- Cheers.
- See you!
- See you.
- We're just uncovering
what happened before the supermarkets came.
So 50 years ago, each town had many more shops
and was much more connected,
and I think that global food is seemingly good
at the start,
but in the big picture, it's not good.
You know, there was a blip,
and we have to go back to, you know,
local, carbon neutral traveling, trading,
fresh stuff without the food waste.
There's a lot of food waste for the supermarkets,
and travel miles, and everything that gets thrown out.
(bag rustling)
The whole idea is that if we can do it right,
if we model for the rest of the world,
and I really worry about
if we don't get this system in place, something goes wrong,
that the global food giant collapses for some reason.
I think that's really important for people to realize
where your food comes from,
source it locally, and support your growers.
Because if you don't,
they won't be there for you when you need them.
(calming instrumental)
(birds chirping)
- One thing that disturbs me,
I've heard this from a number of people
is that they've had beautiful gardens,
but then they've gotten elderly and had to go to a home,
or retire to another property,
and when they leave, in come the developers
and the work of a lifetime is destroyed.
From older people who I've talked to,
that's devastating, it's just awful.
My hope here with this garden
is not that it will continue exactly as it is now,
because it won't, trees don't, trees get bigger,
and they change, it's a natural succession,
and I'm not trying to fight that.
I wanna make it impossible
for the developers to do anything with.
With that in mind,
I'm planting now examples of forest giants.
Such as Totara, Rimu, Kahikatea, Kauri,
those great New Zealand, long lasting conifers,
and so on.
That with a bit of good fortune might last a thousand years.
So I'm figuring that if I plant those now,
it'll be quite a long time before they're oversized,
that'll interfere with how this forest garden works.
(birds chirping)
When I expire and I'm covered in leaves
and left to decompose out here in the garden,
the world will have changed so much
that no one will be cutting down big established trees.
They'll be regarded the way they should be regarded,
as treasure.
I'm getting in now, I'm doing the planting now,
because I think that when that happens
I don't want people just to go,
"oh, we better get planting."
I want people to think,
"wow, that was planted a long time ago!"
And I'll be laughing in my grave.
(Robert chuckles)
(calming instrumental)
- When we came to Riverton,
we had a lot of older gardeners join our group
and taught us (indistinct) things,
and so I've really wanted to capture all the information
through the environment center and education works.
It's nice that now it's trendy, people want to know.
But for a long time, no one really cared.
They just wanted their (indistinct) at the supermarket.
And now I'm so lucky that people have said,
"Oh, we want to do this again."
It's nice when you get older to be considered,
you know, wise old folk.
(Robyn laughs)
I think it's a privilege that people listen to us
and make changes in their life for the better.
(lettuce crunching)
- I'm ridiculously optimistic about the future.
I also am fully aware
that this is the most dangerous time we've ever lived in.
Particularly because a lot of those systems
appear to be coming to the end,
we do appear to be on the brink.
But I think that the way human consciousness is,
that those transformative moments are at moments
of great danger.
And I think that we're at one now,
and we're at the most significant one.
(plants crunching)
When the world was more forested,
and the people living in those forest woodlands
did have a relationship that was reciprocal,
and was generous, and that was functioning.
I think that has to happen again.
And this little model here,
there are lots of other models
that work just as well as this one,
but this little model here,
from my point of view, is a really good example.
(birds chirping)
People can be meaningfully engaged in activities
that support themselves.
They can grow their own food,
they can produce materials for building,
they can keep bees, all the different things you can do.
The opportunities that need people,
it's the opposite of industrialization
or intensification where you need hardly anybody
cause machines are doing it, or herbicides are doing it,
but when you put people back into an environment,
help them to make it worthwhile and healthy,
especially for your mind.
This is the way forward for humanity in my view.
(uplifting music)
(birds chirping)