pendragon orchard and vine
There's No Place Like Loam
The Edible Landscape Field Guide
Resilient Plants for Food Forests & Edible Landscapes
A food forest is only as strong as the species you plant in it. This guide collects the workhorses—the plants that feed people, build soil, and hold the system together. No ornamentals for show. Just species that earn their place, layer by layer.
Edible Landscape Species List
This is where theory meets the dirt. Each species listed here has earned its place in the food forest by doing more than one job. They feed people, support pollinators, heal the soil, or hold the edges together. Click through to read the full profiles—practical, gritty notes on what to plant, why it matters, and how to keep it working for you.
Jerusalem Artichoke
Helianthus tuberosus
Plant what looks like a potato and you’ll wake up with a forest. Jerusalem artichokes throw up ten-foot stalks with yellow blooms, then quietly leave their real harvest underground—nutty, knobby tubers. Too tall for the orchard understory, they shine on the margins, acting as food, mulch, pollinator patch, and living fence all in one.
Functions
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Food (tubers)
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Chop-and-drop mulch
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Pollinator support,
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Screen/windbreak,
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Soil improvement
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Aesthetics
Hazelnut (Filbert)
Corylus avellana
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A cornerstone of the lower tree layer, hazelnuts deliver protein- and fat-rich nuts, coppice wood for poles and fuel, and dense hedges that shelter wildlife. Hardy in Zone 8, they thrive with little care once established.
Functions
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Food (tubers)
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Chop-and-drop mulch
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Pollinator support,
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Screen/windbreak,
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Soil improvement
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Aesthetics
Russian Comfrey
Symphytum × uplandicum
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The classic permaculture support plant. Russian comfrey doesn’t feed you directly, but it feeds everything else. Deep roots haul minerals up from the subsoil, packing them into leaves that break down into rich green mulch. Cut it back a few times a season and you’ve got compost activator, liquid fertilizer, and livestock fodder. Purple blooms draw in bees, and the dense clumps work as living barriers along orchard edges. Hardy, reliable, and almost impossible to kill once established.
Functions
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Food (tubers)
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Chop-and-drop mulch
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Pollinator support,
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Screen/windbreak,
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Soil improvement
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Aesthetics
Aronia (Chokeberry)
aronia melanocarpa
Aronia isn’t just another berry — it’s a shrub that thrives in bad soil, feeds wildlife, blazes red in the fall, and delivers an antioxidant punch that makes blueberries look like the losers’ bracket. Call it chokeberry if you want, but it’s no joke. This is the shrub layer’s secret weapon, and once you plant it, you’ll wonder how your orchard survived without it.
Functions
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Food: Superberries for juice, wine, preserves, and smoothies.
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Medicine: High antioxidant, anti-inflammatory properties.
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Wildlife Support: Flowers for pollinators, berries for birds and mammals, dense cover for nesting.
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Ornamental Value: Four-season interest — blossoms, glossy foliage, fall color.
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Soil Resilience: Tolerates clay, sand, wet ground; stabilizes soil.
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Privacy/Windbreak: Thick shrubs form natural screens.
European chestnuts and their hybrids
Castanea sativa
Generational wealth isn’t always a ledger or a deed — sometimes it’s a grove, a canopy, a place where your great-grandchildren might sit down to eat together. The only way to reclaim that kind of wealth is to plant it now, and believe that life will still be lived under trees centuries from today.
Functions
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Canopy builder: Reaches 40–60 feet, arching into a cathedral crown within 15 years.
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Food crop: High-yielding, starchy nuts — the “bread tree” of Europe — roasted, milled, or brewed.
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Ecosystem ally: Stabilizes slopes, enriches soil, feeds wildlife, offers shade and structure for guild layers.
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Timber: Lightweight, rot-resistant, once called “poor man’s oak.” Ideal for posts, beams, and vineyard trellises.
(Black) Hawthorn - Arguably the Best Species for Your Landscape Design
Castanea sativa
The real power of hawthorn isn’t just in its thorns, its medicine, or its fruit—it’s in the graft. This native rootstock will shoulder pears, medlars, even shipova, turning a wild hedge into a mixed-fruit wonder. One cut, one scion, and you’ve bent the wild to your table.
Functions
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Food & Medicine (Spit the Pit)
Haws won’t win dessert contests, but dried, stewed, or brewed they’ll carry you through winter—just enjoy the flesh and spit the pits. -
Ecology
A fortress for wildlife, hawthorn feeds pollinators, shelters birds, anchors streambanks, and drops fruit that thrushes and bears strip bare. -
Permaculture Workhorse
Plant hawthorn thick and you’ve got a living fence, a windbreak, and a soil-builder all rolled into one thorn-armored package. -
Grafting & Trickery
Hawthorn is the roughneck rootstock that lets pears, medlars, and even shipova ride on its toughness. -
Other Uses
Its wood is dense enough to blunt tools, its thorns mark thresholds, and it’s long stood between wild ground and the cultivated. -
No Fence Fruit Tree
Graft pears high on mature hawthorn branches and you get fruit above deer browse—an instant orchard without building a fence. -
Aesthetics
From froth of spring blossom to autumn’s black fruit and scarlet leaves, hawthorn is raw beauty with thorns that refuse to be ornamental.