Cornucopia Food Forest Gardens[http://cornucopiafoodforest.wordpress.com/about/]
Cornucopia Food Forest Gardens provide a continual abundance of beauty, nourishment, healing, fertility, and fun! while functioning as an ecosystem- taking care of the Earth and the People. It is a service by John Valenzuela.
John Valenzuela is a horticulturist, consultant and educator who has returned to live in Northern California after being based in Hawai’i for 15 years.
First introduced to the sustainable design theories and methods of permaculture in 1989, John studied and practiced tropical permaculture and taught extensively in the Hawaiian Islands. He has been a lead permaculture design course instructor at the Bullock Family Homestead in Orcas Island, Washington for over 10 years, and also has experience teaching in Costa Rica and now throughout urban and rural California, collaborating with leading permaculture organizations (see the Colaborative Community  page on this site)
His special interests are rare fruit, home gardening, trees, traditional agriculture, plant propagation, and ethnobotany. He is active in the Golden Gate chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers where he has been the Annual Scion Exchange coordinator for the last two years, and now serves as Chapter Chairperson.
He now lives and grows in North Eastern Marin County California,  where he is diversifying a food forest garden with over 150 varieties of fruit on multi-grafted trees, along with a small nursery, while practicing photography, developing educational materials, freelance consulting, team teaching, planting and maintaining gardens.
John is known for an engaging enthusiasm that matches his depth of plant knowledge.
More on Food Forests:

Food Forests- growing an ecosystem of abundance, by John Valenzuela
Also known as ‘Door Yard Garden’, ‘Mixed Garden’, Huerta Casero, and Kampong, ‘Food Forest’ is an term coined by Englishman Robert Hart to describe the intensive food, medicine, craft, and ornamental gardens of trees, shrubs, herbs and annuals that surround homes in Kerala India, Meso-America, Indonesia, and many other cultures. He recreated this, with appropriately selected species, at his own home in a cool Northern European maritime climate. The archetypical food forests found in the rainy and sun soaked tropical climates can encourage a very dense spacing of plants, this density may not be appropriate for all climates. For the more limited water and lower sun angle found in a Mediterranean climate, plants could be placed farther apart as found in the Mission Gardens of old California.
Of course the original food forests in this area are the native oak and pine forests, with understories consisting of patches of berries, green herbs and edible bulb crops adapted to California’s varied ecosystems, which were sustainably managed by local indigenous tribal cultures for thousands of years. With the Spanish missionaries came the ‘biblical trees’ common to Southern Europe, North Africa, the Middle east, and beyond: olives, figs, grapes, pomegranates, citrus and date palms, along with deciduous fruit like apples pears, peaches plums, apricots, cherries. Also many fruits from Mexico and Central and South America were brought by the missionaries, including avocado, white sapote, bananas, capulin cherry, guava, and papaya, among others.
Later immigrants from the Eastern, and Mid-Western US, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, brought increasing numbers of varieties and species. It was common in many communities to find mixed gardens of nuts, fruits, herbs, flowers and vegetables. Especially in neighborhoods with smaller yards, there was no choice but to have all their favorite plants all growing very closely together. Later, industrial economies put people to work in factories so they could buy produce from farmers, but they began to neglect their own gardens. Yet perennial food gardens such as food forests persist even when abandoned or forgotten, ready to provide when another generation is ready to tend and harvest. Tending a garden is something very basic to much of humanity. Even with all of our modern distractions, home gardening is still one of the most popular activities in the US.
The physical structure of the food forest imitates a wild forest, with many layers of vegetation, from tall canopy trees to smaller trees, shrubs, herbs, ground covers, root crops, fungi, and climbing vines. In addition, many of the forest ecosystem functions are replicated in a food forest: including enhancing the resources of water, fertility, and beneficial habitat. Basins are used to allow water infiltration for `zero runoff’, and recycled water is used from rooftop rain catchment and gray water sources. Mulch and compost crops contribute to the soil fertility cycles. Various habitats for beneficial creatures are enhanced in the food forest, providing pollen and nectar for pest predator and pollinator habitat, in addition to shelter for other pest predators including amphibians, reptiles, chickens, ducks, raptors and even bats. Human needs the food forest provides for feature a continuous year ’round harvest of a nutritionally diverse diet, culinary herbs, medicinal herbs, fragrant and colorful flowers, lumber, fuel, fiber, dye and other useful materials for craft.
Food forests are really nothing new, some version of them are still to be found in our very own neighborhoods today, many originally planted generations ago. We are reviving this tradition with new plantings of diverse, productive and resilient ecosystems providing a backyard cornucopia in these uncertain times.
-JV

Collaborative Community: Excellent groups and individuals I am proud to work with-
* Bullock Brothers Permaculture Homestead with Douglas Bullock [http://permacultureportal.com/]
* Regenerative Design Institute with Penny Livingston [http://www.regenerativedesign.org/]
* Occidental Arts and Ecology Center with Brock Dolman [http://www.oaec.org/brockdolmanbio]
* Earthflow Design Works with Larry Santoyo [http://www.earthflow.com/]
* Jay Garden Designs with Jay Bretz
* Living Mandala with Jay Ma [http://www.livingmandala.com/Living_Mandala/Living_Mandala.html]
* California Rare Fruit Growers Golden Gate Chapter [http://crfg.org/]
* Sentient Landscape with Geoff Hall and Kamala Bennett [http://www.sentientlandscape.com/]
* Mendocino Ecological Learning Center with Maximillian Meyers [http://www.melc.us/index.html]
* UC Davis, ANR Cooperative Extension Marin County with Steve Quirt [http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/organic/directory.asp?ID=92]
* Indian Valley Organic Farm and Garden with Wendy Johnson, Jenna Braeger, Henry Wallace [http://indianvalleyfarmandgarden.blogspot.com/]
* Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, Hall Middle School Food Forest, Larkspur with Rebecca Newburn [http://www.richmondgrows.org/]
* Merritt College Permaculture with Christopher Shein, Anders Vistrand, Ken Litchfield [http://www.merrittlandhort.com/permaculture/permaculture.html]
* Earth Repair with Lindsay Dailey [http://edgeecology.wordpress.com/bios/]
* Alameda Master Gardeners Seminar with Delia Carroll [http://acmg.ucdavis.edu/Fall_Seminar/]
* SF Permaculture Guild with Kevin Bayuk, Fred Bove [http://www.permaculture-sf.org/]
* Common Vision Fruit Tree Tour with Michael Flynn [http://www.commonvision.org/index.php]
* Earth Action Mentor with Doniga Markegard [http://www.earthactionmentor.org/]
* Permaculture Marin with Dustin Kahn [http://www.permaculturemarin.org/]
* Urban Permaculture Guild [http://www.urbanpermacultureguild.org/], Esalen Institute [http://www.esalen.org/info/sustainability.html] with Kat Steele
* Benjamin Fahrer [http://www.benjaminfahrer.com/Benjamin_Fahrer/Home.html]
* Planting Justice
* Villa Sobrante
and many others. . .