Gardening Belizean style, part 2

If you look at the Google map of where my "farm" is, you can easily see where the native rainforest has been disrupted. The largest areas are citrus farms, which is one of the major industries of Belize. Others areas have been cleared for cattle pastures. My tract of land is dark green, meaning that most of the vegetation is thick older forest. I bought it on discount—land with the trees still intact is two to three times less expensive than those where everything has been knocked down (don't quite understand this, but....) You can tell where my place is if you are on the ground; it stands like a fortress towering to 120 ft among the mostly 15 foot high citrus groves.

I am trying to find the right mix of planting, restoring, and preserving the gem that I have. I suppose one way to do this is to leave it alone; on the practical side, I need to develop it enough so that it can be used by my friends and guests to appreciate and learn from this oasis. I'll take suggestions or criticism.

One idea that I have come up with involves planting along trails cut in the mature forest. I came up with this idea after spending three summers working for a small cruise line in southeastern Alaska. The forest service plays a trick on the visitors by leaving a forest buffer where the tourists can see and clear-cutting the backside of the hills that they can't see (see map of "scenic viewshed" large pdf.) I want to do the opposite. Leave the forest mostly intact, while planting noteworthy and useful greenery a couple of trees deep on each side of a path. This way the ecosystems stay intact with minimal impact. There is no baking or drying out of the soil from large clearings. The forest also supplies a beautiful green and mature backdrop to anything I plant.

Farming this way will require more maintenance; there is an enormous seed bank of plants fighting for those newly cut spaces. It does give me confidence, though that if I ever stop the maintenance, the forest will return quickly to its former self, where as, it can take 150 years to re-vitalize old cow pasture land.