The Lost Forest Gardens of Europe

“In the hills above the Po river in northern Italy, there are a handful of farms that look almost the same today as they would have three thousand years ago”

“Between these rows of grapes and trees are diverse plots of cereals, hayfields, vegetables, and herbs. In a single field, one can find all of the staples needed to live and support the farmstead, and more to sell at a high premium”

“This is a resilient system – a farm modeled on a forest. Unlike monocultures of grapes or grain, diversity is the strength here”

“Disease outbreaks and unseasonable weather have a limited impact. If one crop has a bad year, there are a dozen others to pick up the slack”

“These are agricultural ecosystems designed to last millennia – and that is exactly what they have done”

“This style of growing is called coltura promiscua – “mixed cultivation” – a practice with roots that run deep in these hills. It is one of a handful of truly indigenous systems of farming remaining throughout Europe, adapted and perfected over thousands of years from the earliest hunter-gatherers through to the present day”

“It has shrugged off extreme climate change events, countless wars and invasions, pestilence and plagues, cultural erasure and colonization”

“This is the kind of farming system that is needed in the 21st century: a fully-integrated three-dimensional farm ecosystem that supports people and animals, provides staples and specialty products, increases local biodiversity, and does not require chemicals or elaborate technology”

“Whereas modern industrial agriculture is descended from a distinctly imperialist Roman plantation system based on slave labor, systems like coltura promiscua are the direct descendants of the indigenous forest gardens of pre-agricultural Europe”

“Since the Neolithic Revolution, an assortment of farming systems in Europe that relied heavily on monocultures and a handful of finicky staple crops often ended abruptly and violently. The diverse forest gardens of peasants, however, have quietly shrugged off ten thousand years of turbulent changes”

“Much as peaches, once introduced, were spread across North America by indigenous people in a matter of decades, the pollen record shows that hazel (Corylus avellana) suddenly becomes ubiquitous across Europe as soon as the climate warmed, brought to every corner of the continent by hunter-gatherers. Hazel was the original Tree of Life for Mesolithic Europeans”

“The nuts are about 60% fat and 20% carbohydrates, and contain a wide range of proteins, vitamins and minerals – a few handfuls can cover most of a person’s daily energy needs”

“Its branches, tall and flexible but slender enough to cut with a flint axe, were used for tools and firewood”

“From cradle to grave, the people of Mesolithic Europe relied on hazel more than any other single plant”

“For over five thousand years, this single plant was the lifegiver to nearly all of Europe’s people”

“In addition to hazel, Mesolithic people utilized up to 450 different species of edible plants – many of which were common plants of forest edge habitats. Wild vegetables (many of which are considered weeds today) like nettle, knotweed, lesser celandine, dock, lambs quarters, fruits like sloe plum, rowan, hawthorn, crabapple, pear, cherry, grape, raspberry, and tubers of aquatic plants were all part of the Mesolithic diet”

“These European native plants were likely utilized by Mesolithic hunter gatherers for the same reason they are often seen as weeds today: they’re extremely resilient, aggressive, and adaptive species that can be encouraged to grow with minimal effort”

“These were not bands of starving cavemen constantly on the precipice of death, but rich and resilient societies that had a much more diverse diet than most present-day Europeans”

“And for their rich and diverse diet, Mesolithic people worked less than anyone who came after. Hunting and gathering requires just a few hours of work each day – far easier than farming, much less modern work schedules”

“After helping to create Europe’s forests by bringing favored plants like hazel with them, they continued to manage their landscape with hand tools and fire. Europe was not a pristine wilderness, but a continent of handcrafted nut orchards and semi-wild forest gardens carefully managed for thousands of years”

“This tracks with common themes around the world: indigenous people in Australia, North and South America, and elsewhere have used fire and specialized hand tools to achieve unprecedented levels of environmental stewardship and management for millennia”

“Nor was this anything new: humans (and their Neanderthal and Homo heidelbergensis ancestors) have been shaping Europe’s ecology for over 800,000 years. These Mesolithic forest gardens were simply the most recent and nuanced manifestation of an ancient ecological relationship”

“Areas around settlements and camp sites were regularly burned to limit the encroachment of the forest, and to favor food-producing forest edge trees species. These controlled burns established open park-like habitats, which could lead to a tenfold increase in the amount of wild game animals present, creating greater opportunities for hunting red deer, wild boar, and aurochs”

“Coppicing was another important strategy for managing the Mesolithic forest garden. Certain trees and shrubs, like hazel, can be cut to the ground every few years. Instead of hurting the tree, this effectively rejuvenates it, allowing the plant to live far longer than it would if unmanaged. Hazel in a wild state generally lives around 70 or 80 years, but with regular coppicing it can thrive and produce wood and nuts for centuries. Willow, another plant with many uses and benefits, is managed in this way as well”

“For thousands of years, Mesolithic people across Eurasia had lived by their covenant with the web of life: a sacred pact that was defined by reciprocal relationships with their human and non-human neighbors”

“Unbeknownst to them, however, major events half a globe away were about to change this way of life forever.

Around 10,800 BCE the North American ice sheets collapsed, causing glacial melt waters to cool the North Atlantic and kickstarting a global drop in temperatures. Within a few centuries, conditions in Europe and the Near East were almost as cold as the previous Ice Age. This period, known as the Younger Dryas, lasted for over a thousand years”

“In the Near East, hunter-gatherer cultures saw their entire way of life collapse. Their Edenic landscape of fruit and nut trees withered in the cold, the large herds of wild game disappeared. They had always grown and eaten the seeds of native grasses as a supplemental part of their diet. During the Younger Dryas, however, these grasses (and some legumes) became the only crops they could reasonably rely on. A thousand years of planting and harvesting had the effect of fully domesticating these species. When the climate finally warmed again in 9,600 BCE, they had a crop that had never been seen before: grain”

“Wheat, barley, peas, beans, and flax had gone from wild survival foods to domesticated staples”

“A period of dramatic climate change had brought about a new class of food that would forever change the world. This new age, defined not by hunting and gathering, but by the cultivation of grains, is known as the Neolithic (“new stone age”).”

“Every dramatic change or fluctuation in climate, from the Neolithic to the present day, precipitates major changes in agriculture”

“Grain was a radically new type of food for Europeans. Unlike tree crops that take years to mature, cereals provide immediate food security in a pinch as they can be grown and harvested in a single season”

“With each period of climate-induced chaos in Europe’s prehistory, cereal farming communities expanded ever deeper into Mesolithic Europe. When conditions improved, these farming communities grew in population far more quickly than the relatively stable hunter-gatherer tribes”

“Mesolithic people were not unaware of grain growing – they had been experimenting with it for millennia before Near Eastern farming cultures entered the scene. The spread of farming, therefore, was not due to the supposed superiority of grains, but because repeated periods of climate change and the resulting social chaos pushed Mesolithic Europeans to adopt new ways of life to survive”

“For the first few millennia of farming in Europe, before the advent of traction ploughing, families cultivated the land with digging sticks, hoes, mattocks, and footploughs. This was human-scale agriculture, unable to expand past the limits of a person’s energy”

“As a result, Neolithic farming communities generally did not overexploit their environment, but instead cultivated small plots of land for vast lengths of time with hand tools, crop rotations, and fertilization from livestock manure, compost, and night soil – leaving the land they tended more fertile than when they found it”

“These ancient farmsteads were the original “regenerative farming” innovators, and in many ways resembled today’s small organic farms and homesteads of a few acres. Monocultures did not yet exist as a concept”

“Grains were not grown as fields of a single variety, but as diverse mixes of cereals and legumes called ‘maslins’ (or ‘mashlum’ in Scots). Ancient grains like emmer, einkorn, and barley were grown together with peas and lentils. Hemp, flax, and poppies were common supplemental crops as well. These diverse mixed fields were far more resilient than monocultures – in some parts of Europe, they’ve existed unchanged for 4,000 years”

“Seasonal weather differences might benefit einkorn one year, and barley the next. Whether the year was cold or hot, wet or dry, there would always be a crop to harvest. Unlike modern varieties, ancient grain landraces were bred to have a long harvest window that protected them against total crop failure in case of a freak weather event”

“Maslins of crop landraces were a simple but effective way for small farmers to hedge their bets against variable seasonality and climate change. Newer research into growing mixes of cereals and legumes has confirmed what Neolithic farmers always knew: that these intercrop mixes of grain and legumes are superior to monocultures by nearly every metric”

“Many of the oldest European landraces of cattle and pigs today are the direct descendants of these Neolithic hybrids of wild and domesticated animals”

“In Spain the Iberian pig is a central component of the dehesa system – an ancient agroecological masterpiece. The dehesas are man-made oak savannahs throughout Spain and Portugal, populated with traditional landraces of livestock on grassland, with holm oak (Quercus ilex) and cork oak (Quercus suber) dotting the landscape. Jamón ibérico, wild game, and non-meat products like truffles, mushrooms, honey, fighting bulls, and cork are valuable yields in this system”

“As an agroecosystem it has existed in its basic form for at least 4,500 years, and in essence is a domesticated form of the fire-managed Mesolithic nut tree savannahs – replacing aurochs and wild boar with cattle and pigs”

“Not only is the dehesa a low-input silvopasture system, it has existed for so many millennia that it is now an important ecosystem in its region, allowing it to support an enormous range of biodiversity”

“These systems challenge the very definition of farming, and show us what agriculture can be when people create it as a fully-fledged ecosystem, rather than simply a way to mine nutrients from the soil”