- 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)
