How Do Plants Support Each Other in a Permaculture Tree Guild?

First let’s look at the fruit tree:

besides the obvious provision of fruit for humans, the tree provides food and habitat for many other creatures. Birds can roost or nest in it, bees get nutrition from the flowers, and many animals consume those fruits that humans leave behind. At the end of each summer, I find both honey bees and wasps feasting upon all the plums that have fallen and split open. I don’t clear these fruits away, nor do I take all the fruit from the tree when I harvest. There are plenty of hungry birds and mammals out there who need food.

The tree also gives us shade in the summer. If it’s a deciduous tree, it makes sense to plant it on the south side of the house (in the northern hemisphere), where it will cool the house in summer and let light in during the winter. When the leaves fall, they return nutrients to the soil, also providing nesting places for bumble bees and small mammals. The tree can also stabilize soil on a hill, and some trees, such as locusts, fix nitrogen. Finally, the tree will provide wood, either through coppicing/pollarding, or when it falls.

Like the tree, the rest of the plants in your tree guild should fulfill at least one of six functions, preferably more than one. These functions are: weed suppression, attraction of pollinators and other beneficial bugs, repelling of pests, Nitrogen fixing, mulching, and nutrient accumulation. 

1.The first function, weed suppression, applies mostly to the ground cover and herbaceous layers. Strawberries, violets, and oregano, for example, will choke out many weeds. A word to the wise: NEVER plant peppermint or spearmint in your guild, as it will completely dominate!

2.When choosing your guild plants, try to opt for a lot of pollinator friendly plants. These pollinator plants can be shrubs, herbs, dwarf trees, or ground covers. Think of bee balm, which is good for tea making as well as for bees, or rosemary, lavender, zinnias, penstemons, oregano, elderberries, and blueberries, to name a few. When you plant these, you’re not only feeding pollinators, but also attracting them. Your tree will bear more fruit.

3.Now that you’ve chosen your tree, your weed suppressors, and your pollinator plants, it’s time to find some pest repelling plants. Onions, for example, contain sulphur, which repels cabbage moths, aphids, slugs, and carrot flies. You can plant Egyptian Walking onions, chives, garlic, or garlic chives. Southernwood (Artemisia abrotanum) is another good choice. I’ve planted it near apple trees, and ever since that I have only found one wormy apple. 

Southernwood can grow large and spread, so I hack it back quite severely and lay it down around my plants as mulch. Whenever you use pulled weeds or prunings as mulch, make sure that they are not producing seeds and nothing takes root, unless you want it to. Marigolds are another good pest repellent. (Plant them near your tomatoes!). Finally, lemon balm contains citronella, but I would be careful about planting it, as it can become a “weed”.

4.Next up are the Nitrogen fixers. On large properties, some Permaculturists plant a nitrogen fixing tree, such as a locust or Russian olive, but that’s not a practical idea for the person who has a half acre or less to work with. It makes a lot more sense to plant clover, lupines, beans, or peas. You can plant a Siberian pea shrub, which is a Nitrogen fixer, and whose pods are tasty and edible, but it will grow pretty large, so I wouldn’t use it on a very small property. I have some in Montana, and they make a great edible privacy hedge, but they do have thorns, so keep that in mind.

You can plant fava beans and chop them down before they flower. If you let them go to seed, they’ll use up a lot of the nutrients and nitrogen, as the energy will go into bean production. This isn’t a disaster, however; you can eat the beans and chop down the plants to use as mulch, adding organic matter to the soil.

5.And speaking of soil, plant some mulch maker plants!

These include hostas, comfrey, deciduous shrubs, and buckwheat. To use them as mulch, simply hack them up, leaving the roots and lower leaves, and lay them down as mulch around your plants. 

Many of these plants perform more than the one function of making mulch: hosta shoots are edible, hosta flowers are pretty and popular with pollinators, and the leaves become good mulch. Comfrey mines the soil for nutrients and attracts pollinators, it makes incredible mulch, it activates compost, and it can be used as a poultice for bruises and broken bones. It’s also edible in moderation. Many deciduous shrubs feed both humans and pollinators. 

Even if you choose none of these plants, or if you can’t grow them in your location, you can still use plants to make mulch. You can pull or chop down your weeds and simply lay them down around your plants, to cover and feed the soil. As you feed the soil, you’re creating more soil. Cover the soil to reduce water loss through evaporation!

6. Now we arrive at the bioaccumulator plants. That’s a fancy name for deep rooted plants that pull up nutrients from deeper soil, making those nutrients available to the plants you want to foster. Comfrey, borage, chicory, and dandelion all do this. Treat them as you would the mulch makers: pull some up and lay them down, or give them a harsh trim and leave the root. Those nutrients that were deeper down in the soil are pulled up by the bioaccumulator plants, and when you lay cuttings of these plants down on the soil surface, those nutrients that were once deep in the soil become available to more shallow rooted plants. If you don’t like the look of them lying around on your soil, you can dig them into your compost. Comfrey is a compost activator. By putting these plants in your compost, you will make sure that your plants still receive those nutrients when you spread the compost around them.

As you look through this long list of niches and functions, you may notice quite a bit of overlap. Many plants perform more than one function, and many functions are covered by more than one type of plant. This creates more resilience in the garden.

Bill Mollison, one of the fathers of Permaculture, said that in redundancy lies resilience.

To illustrate this point: if one of your pollinator plant species dies, your other plants will still be pollinated, as long as you have at least one other type of pollinator plant. Creating this network of functions and species builds a healthier garden – in Permaculture one seeks not only diversity of species, but also diversity of relationships between species.

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