Gaia’s Garden, A Guide to Home-scale Permaculture

By Toby Hemenway(pg4-5)

WHAT IS PERMACULTURE? I refer often in this book to permaculture and ecological design, two closely related fields upon which many of the ideas in this book are based. Since permaculture may be an unfamiliar word to some readers, I should do some explaining.

Permaculture is a set of techniques and principlesfor designing sustainable human settlements. The word, a contraction of both “permanent culture” and “permanent agriculture,” was coined by Bill Mollison, acharismatic and iconoclastic one-time forester, schoolteacher, trapper, and field naturalist, and one of his students, David Holmgren.

Mollison says the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 when he was observing marsupials browsing in the forests of Tasmania, and jotted in his diary, “I believe that we could build systems that would function as well as this one does.”

In the 1970s, he and Holmgren began to develop a set of techniques for holistic landscape designs that are modeled after nature yet include humans. Permaculture’s vision is of people participating in and benefiting from an abundant, nurturing natural world.

Though permaculture practitioners design with plants, animals, buildings, and organizations, they focusless on those objects themselves than on the careful design of relationships among them—interconnections—that will create a healthy, sustainable whole.

Interconnections are what turns a collection of unrelated parts into a functioning system, whether it’s a community, a family, or an ecosystem.

The aim of permaculture is to create ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethical principles—care for the earth, care for people, and sharing the surplus. From these stem a set of design guidelines. Some of these guidelines are based on our understanding of nature, such as, “Each element should perform several functions,” and, “Use natural plant succession to create favorable sites and soils.” Others are borrowed from stable, long-term societies, such as, “Use renewable resources,” and, “Begin the garden at your doorstep.”

Many of these design guidelines are given in various books about permaculture, listed in the bibliography. Together they combine to create away to design sustainable gardens, landscapes, towns, and cultures.

From this it is obvious that permaculture is about much more than gardening. But since permaculture emphasizes the role of plants and animals in human life, many people have come to permaculture through their love of gardening and agriculture. What I call ecological gardens draw much from permaculture.This book could easily have been called The Permaculture Garden, but that title has already been used by a British author, Graham Bell. Also, I wanted to use a term that was familiar to most people, and permaculture is not yet widely recognized in North America.

I hope this book will help remedy that. Most of the gardeners interviewed for this book consider themselves permaculturists, and many of the techniques described here were first assembled in Mollison’s books on permaculture.

Gardeners are people who love plants, and by extension, nature itself. For gardeners to be on the forefront of a better relationship between humans and nature seems only natural. It is my hope that the ideas in this book, based on permaculture and other methods of sustainable design, will encourage gardeners to reduce their own ecological impact ,and lead the way, through beautiful, lush landscapes, for others to do the same.