Emiel’s Food Forest
Honouring Emiel. Honouring Something Ancient.
Emiel’s Food Forest grows on 1.3 hectares of land on the northern shore of Loch Rannoch in Perthshire. This land that once fed farming families, was cleared in the 1830s, and has rested under sporting estate management for nearly two centuries.
It was planted in October 2024 in memory of Aemilius Justin Matthias van Well (1996–2022) – Emiel – whose love for Talladh-a-Bheithe, for its sound of silence and its beautiful nature, inspired his father Adrian, who manages the estate for the family, to mark that love in the land itself.
One hundred percent of the trees planted survived their first winter. 99.2% continue to grow into their second year.
Planting the food forest opened into something larger than personal memory. People have tended this ground for thousands of years. The land on which these trees are now growing was a working farm before it became a sporting estate when it was cleared of its farming community in the 1830s, part of a pattern that emptied both shores of Loch Rannoch within a generation.
From approximately 9,000 BCE, Mesolithic communities were actively tending the ecological systems that fed them across the land that would become Highland Perthshire — not passive inhabitants of untouched wilderness, but intelligent managers of wild food systems. Through the runrig farming townships of the clan period, through orchard cultivation and seasonal transhumance, Highland communities maintained what we would now recognise as integrated, layered, perennial land systems something agroforestry scholars might call food forests, though the communities who practised them needed no special name for it. It was simply how land was tended.
The farm of Ardlarach, on the north shore of Loch Rannoch, the land within what is now Talladh-a-Bheithe estate, was tenanted by three farming families who were, in the account given to the Highland Clearances inquiry, ‘in good circumstances.’ They were removed. That integration, which had sustained three families and their communities, was replaced by a simplification that sustained no one.
Emiel’s Food Forest is growing on that ground. It is the most explicit enactment of the convergent land wisdom that this place has carried for thousands of years. It will become layered. It is perennial. It is place-specific. It is tended by people in direct relationship with this ground.
Where We Are Now
Developed by Earthself Initiatives in collaboration with Talladh-a-Bheithe Estate, with an academic partnership with the University of the Highlands and Islands, Emiel’s Food Forest is entering its second year with deep roots and growing momentum.
At the start of 2024, an £7.5k innovation voucher funded a partnership with the University of Highlands and Islands to develop plans for the food forest, matched by an equal in-kind contribution from Earthself. In October 2024, over 125 trees were planted with the support of students, local volunteers, and community members, raising just under £10k to support the project.
Food Forest Champion: notch.eco
Food Forest Partners: Highland Game, Frinova Woodlands, Bidwells, Falling Leaf Clothing, BMP Europe, Think Partnership, Camu-fin Private Highland Club, Highland Travel, Taiga Upland, RTS Forestry, Britton Scotland
Food Forest Supporter: Own Your Step, Balanced by Nature.
What’s growing here includes:
50 apple trees — mainly Scottish varieties — alongside pears, plums, damsons, filberts, walnuts, sweet chestnut, apricot, and medlar. A hedgerow of hornbeam, hazel, hawthorn, crab apple, and blackthorn holds the boundary. Heritage fruit and nut varieties, chosen for this specific Atlantic Highland location and its elevation. Varieties suited to this place, as the communities of Ardlarach chose varieties suited to this place before them.
Started in October 2025, Phase 2 defines wellbeing and forest bathing zones, deepens biodiversity through layering trees and shrubs, deadwood habitats and fungi logs, and establishes a seasonal care and maintenance rhythm that the site can sustain for decades.
Part of Something Larger
Scotland’s integrated land heritage is not in the archives. It is in the ground. And in the ground, it is growing.
Emiel’s Food Forest is the founding site of what Earthself hopes will become a wider network with landowners, communities, and institutions working together to recover what was interrupted, one place at a time. By Year 3, the plan includes launching a Food Forest Network for knowledge exchange, building a replicable impact model, and collaborating with schools, universities, and community groups to grow citizen science and ecological education. By Year 10, a replicable model and learning toolkit will support other estates and communities to adopt what has been learned here.
This is not nostalgia. The practical evidence from across the globe is unambiguous: integrated land systems sequester carbon, build soil, increase biodiversity, improve food security, and sustain communities across generations. The science is catching up with what traditional land managers across the world have known for millennia.