In Rémi Kulik’s garden-forest, the plants grow almost “all by themselves”, in perfect autonomy. The owner takes us on a tour of his garden-forest.
“Here, it grows on its own. It was planted here once, and since then there has been no maintenance. It just works”. Rémi Kulik is the founder of the Jardin d’Emerveille and author of the “Guide du jardin-forêt”. For Brut, he visits his garden-forest which is almost 100% autonomous. The idea of the founder was to “recreate a garden ecosystem based on the natural pattern of a forest”. For this, he mixes climbers, to create shaded areas, brambles, “where large animals cannot enter“, grasslands, and other green areas.
Rémi Kulik sees the gardener as a “conductor” who will decide on the right location of trees and plants. “In our temperate zones, nature wants to go to the forest, so the idea is to understand how nature works, how it will create a forest, how biodiversity will evolve, how the soil will evolve, understand all that, it will allow to use its mechanisms”.
“Everything works in interaction”
On its land, each plant is positioned in a strategic place: in the shaded areas, there are nuts and chestnuts; on more open areas, edge plants, and apples, pears, peaches…; going down in the bushes, blackberries, raspberries, blackcurrants…; further down, towards the meadow, vegetables, such as squash, which need full sun and “the freshness brought by the forest”; always in the meadow, but in the full sun, are planted cereals and aromatics.
“The idea of creating a complete ecosystem and having a level of organic matter in the soil that makes sponges is to have much less need to water. It is also necessary to mix the plants between them. No plant in nature, no living thing, works on its own. Everything works in interaction”. With this ecosystem, Rémi Kulik says “get to have things that are more productive and more resilient than what conventional single-species agriculture does. I don’t know why we don’t go faster. It’s amazing” concludes the founder of the garden-forest.