When you plant a few fruit trees, you are offering an invitation to hundreds of different forms of life. A tree is not a species living in isolation from the rest of nature. It immediately generates a unique habitat both above and below the ground.

Some of the birds, animals, insects, fungi, lichens and plants that interact with the tree are beneficial. Some are neutral. Others are harmful. Managing the biological equilibrium of a single fruit tree, a garden or a small orchard is a difficult but fascinating task. Today, tree experts can reduce the use of chemicals to a minimum, and with careful management, trees can be kept healthy even in a totally organic pest control programme.

Dan Neuteboom has all-round experience of pest and disease control, having worked both in the “chemical age” of the 1960s and 1970s, right through to the organic revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. He is a pioneer of innovative systems based on the use of natural predators that cull the pest population, and at present he is developing ground-breaking work on the role of micro-organisms in providing the tree with natural beneficial substances.