Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture - Hemenway (2001)

This first edition of Gaia's Garden, sparked the imagination of America's home gardeners, introducing permaculture's central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.

Permaculture is a verbal marriage of apermanenta and agriculture. Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include:

• Use of compatible perennials;
• Non-invasive planting techniques;
• Emphasis on biodiversity;
• Specifically adaptable to local climate, landscape, and soil conditions;
• Highly productive output of edibles.

Now, picture your backyard as one incredibly lush garden, filled with edible flowers, bursting with fruit and berries, and carpeted with scented herbs and tangy salad greens. The visual impact is of Monetas palette, a wash of colour, texture, and hue. But this is no still life. The flowers nurture endangered pollinators. Bright-featured songbirds feed on abundant berries and gather twigs for their nests.

The plants themselves are grouped in natural communities, where each species plays a role in building soil, deterring pests, storing nutrients, and luring beneficial insects. And finally, you--good ola homo sapiens--are an integral part of the scene. Your garden tools are resting against a nearby tree, and have a slight patina of rust, because this garden requires so little maintenance. You recline into a hammock to admire your work. You have created a garden paradise.

This is no dream, but rather an ecological garden, which takes the principles of permaculture and applies them on a home-scale. There is nothing technical, intrusive, secretive, or expensive about this form of gardening. All that is required is some botanical knowledge (which is in this book) and a mindset that defines a backyard paradise as something other than a carpet of grass fed by MiracleGro.

[font=Trebuchet MS]Reviews[/font]

"Takes the native plants and organic gardening movement to the next level." -- Joel M. Lerner, The Washington Post

"There is so much wisdom in Gaia's Garden that I would need a dozen columns to do it justice. . . a bold, wonderful, nature-embracing and completely sensible vision of the future." -- Justin Siskin, Los Angeles Daily News

"Practical science for making your yard produce food and beauty." -- Rose O'Donnell, The Seattle Times

"A gardener's blueprint for ecological abundance from the ground up." -- Steve Spreckel, Acres USA (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden)

"Outlines a revolutionary course for the future of gardening and agriculture." -- Dr. John Todd, founder of The New Alchemy Institute

"Toby's fun, well-grounded, and engaging book is fast becoming a classic, and deservedly so. Practical yet visionary, broad-ranging yet focused on the basics one needs to know, this is a great place to start on the permaculture path. The new edition builds solidly on the success of the first. Congratulations!" -- Dave Jacke, co-author of the two-volume Edible Forest Gardens

"This is a book you will use and re-use, and enjoy having around for a long time." -- Peter Bane, The Permaculture Activist

[font=Trebuchet MS]About the Author[/font]

Toby Hemenway is the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, and an adjunct assistant professor at Portland State University. He wrote the foreword for Heather C. Flores' Food Not Lawns.

After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was associate editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. His current project is developing urban sustainability resources in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. He teaches permaculture and consults and lectures on ecological design throughout the country. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. He is available for workshops, lectures, and consulting in ecological design.

[font=Trebuchet MS]Strategies for Regenerative Living[/font]
The Center for Pattern Literacy is a consortium of educators, researchers, and designers who use permacultural tools to develop sustainable solutions and strategies in a wide variety of fields. Our mission is to help the public, as well as design professionals, businesses, teachers, and policy-makers adopt and promote practices that are socially, economically, and environmentally responsible. We provide information, speakers, trainings, courses, and workshops to achieve these goals.

The director of the center is Toby Hemenway, and many of his articles, excerpts from books, and permaculture reference materials can be found at this site. Toby offers lectures and workshops on a wide variety of sustainability-related subjects, and certificate permaculture courses.

Website - http://www.patternliteracy.com

Enjoy Con|Cen.

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