Birdhouse Garden

When co-founders John Allen and Bella LeNestour acquired the Hollywood property that would become The BirdHouse in 2014, the lot was full of compacted soil, with only a smattering ornamental vegetation, and partially covered in concrete. Viewed from another vantage point, it was brimming with potential!

Since that time, John and a rotating cast of volunteers and BirdHouse staff, have been continuously applying large batches of homemade compost, straw and other organic mulches, in order to cultivate fruits, vegetables, and medicinal and culinary herbs.

In addition to our dedicated vegetable and herb beds, we have added numerous fruit trees, including bananas, cherimoyas, persimmons, mulberries, and figs. We generously apply municipal wood chip mulch from nearby Griffith Park in order to feed the soil’s fungal biology and steer the ecological succession toward a perennial ‘food forest’ system. A ‘food forest’ or ‘forest garden’ is a multi-storey approach to edible landscape planting that mimics a woodland ecosystem by companion planting in several vertical niches: rhizomes and tubers underground; groundcovers; herbaceous perennials; shrubs; and trees of varying height, which act as canopy for the lower levels and serve as a scaffolding for climbing vines.

We aim to maximize solar energy conversion with intensive planting, which helps to sequester carbon in the soil in the form of living plant roots. Additionally, intensive planting helps to decrease ambient temperature, a key buffer to the urban heat island effect. We also use techniques such as a mixed species cover crop in the cool season to develop soil fertility, and cultivation of ‘green manures’ such as comfrey and Tithonia diversifolia for ‘chop-and-drop’ fertilization.

We celebrate the native plants that have evolved in this biome over the eons and have devoted areas to their cultivation, in order to preserve their genetic diversity and the habitat they provide to birds, insects, and other wildlife.