• Trees can be grown as a crop in themselves, for timber, biomass, or basketry. Many trees and shrubs were formerly important for uses such as ropemaking or in medicinal preparations. 
• Trees and shrubs can represent a valuable soil stabilizing or windbreak resource, enabling adjacent crops, including grass and other fodder crops, to grow better.
• Some trees fix nitrogen in the soil, which directly benefits adjoining crops, or enrich it by taking up scarce minerals and other nutrients from deep in the soil, where more shallow-rooted plants cannot reach them, and making them available through its leaves when they fall in autumn. Where particular soils are known to be poor in particular minerals, judicious planting of particular accumulator species of trees and shrubs can help redress this vital balance (indeed, in a Forest Garden setting, tree species and numbers are carefully chosen to obviate entirely any need for application of specific soil additives). 
• In careful plantings the benefit to surrounding soils is greater than any disadvantage such as shading by mature trees. Livestock benefits from both the improved shelter, and from improved forage quality and quantity.