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Toby Hemenway's book lives up to its reputation as one of the most accessible introductions to the permaculture design method and its applications to creating an ecological garden. He covers the gamut, from observation to designing, soil building to water harvesting, beneficial insects to plant selection, guilds, sectors, zones, and so on. Hemenway writes in a welcome conversational tone and this is no textbook, but "Gaia's Garden" still also includes some great reference material. My copy is soil-stained from consulting it in situ while trying some things out in a new garden bed. Reading the book in bits and pieces over the last year - in part because I was busy with building a community garden, among other things! - was a good way to go because it allowed more of the concepts to sink in, or to affirm things I had read and experienced elsewhere. The best part of this book is the way Hemenway teaches the critical thinking skills to apply permaculture principles in many different settings. Many "homesteading" books fail because they are based in one climate or assume a certain size yard. This book instead looks at the basic structures found in all ecological communities, and then examines different ways they manifest in different settings (in nature and in the garden/farm). Then he teases out the differences and asks what are the different plants reacting to and why? So the reader gains general tools and also the skill to apply them, with the added bonus that most examples were chosen for their relevance to North American climate and soil, so US-based readers can try them out first before striking out on their own designs.
Permaculture is a verbal marriage of "permanent" and "agriculture." Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include: Gaia’s Garden is a space for the community, by the community,' said Nate Agbetu, co-founder of Play Nice.'To educate us all about sustainable practices, while we dance, learn and engage with one another. It’s a project that lives to level up Londoners and supports Culture Mile’s plan for a more inclusive, innovative and sustainable future for the Square Mile.' TL;DR I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in designing and creating a permaculture or ecological garden of their own. 4/5 stars. The classic book about ecological gardening–whatever size your garden–with over 250,000 copies sold!Designing the Ecological Garden, Building and Planting a Keyhole Bed Part Two: THE PIECES OF THE ECOLOGICAL GARDEN Primarily intended as a chillplace to hang outand relax, the garden also exists to teach visitors allaboutenvironmental causesthrough workshops, installations and performances. More than200 young Londonerswere involved in not just the building and gardening but also the curatingofGaia's live events programme. Photo: Francis Augusto Returning to the pervasive symbolism of the day, it seems fitting that Climate in Colour’s first in-person event should have taken place in the Garden. Discussions about online activism and direct action in the form of demonstrations often focus on their impact on the external world. Platforms such as Climate in Colour are lauded for their capacity to instantaneously reach an audience at scale – yet, what is often lost in these discussions is that this mass outreach is atomised and individualistic. In an instant, a person can be plugged into a dizzying array of discussions, podcasts, reading lists, infographics, and online panels, but a post shared to a story or a comment left under a post is often the extent of communal engagement that social media platforms provide. Social media offers a platform for mass engagement, but for the individual that engagement is restricted by design to be isolated. Highlighting why community spaces are so important, the Garden provided a space wherein that individualistic engagement could be transformed into a collective engagement, a communal exchanging of reflections, perspectives, and connections, free from the expectation of turning a profit or maximising online engagement metrics. You can't claim to be no-carbon-impact and off the grid if you're on the internet. The internet is the griddiest grid that ever gridded.
Nothing quite like a community space, is there? Everyone pitching in. Olderpeople mingling with the young. People walking around with spades. It's like a glimpse into a Utopian future where we all live on communes and there's no money or internet. I've found now a few different "comprehensive teach yourself permaculture" books, each tailored to a different audience. Food Not Lawns for the punks and the community organizers, The Urban Homestead for the busy, The Transition Companion for the big picture people and Toolbox for Sustainable Living for the tinkerers. Gaia's Garden stands above these books for its general appeal, a guidebook in clear, flowing language for understanding and working with the ecology of cultivated environments. The main text of the book explains the ideas behind an ecological garden, and gives examples and descriptions of the ideas in action. Specific garden techniques are usually set off from the text in boxes so they are easy to find. Included also are lists of plants relevant to the ideas in the text (insect-attracting species, drought-tolerant plants, etc.), and the appendix contains a large table of useful, multifunctional plants and their characteristics. This book is quite the game changer if you, like me, had a very traditional understanding of gardening and what a garden should look like. As a designer, it completely changed my way of seeing landscaping and what a landscape should look like and work like. This book teaches the basics of permaculture in a practical, non preachy way. It helps you design a forest garden, gives you the bases to work with large scale gardens and small scale gardens -though the actual small scale gardens could use more information, I'm sure there's other books on small spaces. What's important is that once you understand the principles -the major one can be summed up in: nature is doing fine without you, maybe you should let her do her thing- the garden looks like a completely different canvas. It's not 'how can it look good?' but 'what is missing in this ecosystem?'. Why wasn't I thinking about gardens as ecosystems?What really makes this book pop are the last few chapters on guilds and food forests. Finally an approachable guide to directly replicating natural plant communities! Hemenway examines how to figure out what plant communities grow in the habitat where you live, and how to substitute related species with human uses for the usual, natural species found in that ecosystem. I love this because it is awesome. I also love this because it encourages the gardener to go out and understand local forests and maybe even learn to forage while also learning to cultivate the same ecological structures that local wildlife need for survival (wildlife here including bugs and birds), turning the home gardener from someone kind of reducing the overall burden on agricultural land (freeing some up for wildlife habitat, maybe) to someone actually creating a native habitat oasis where they get their food. Ah! I love it. Love it! Sidebars: Woody Ways to Build Soil, The Ultimate, Bomb-proof Sheet Mulch, Starting Plants in Sheet Mulch Each review score is between 1-10. To get the overall score that you see, we add up all the review scores we’ve received and divide that total by the number of review scores we’ve received. In addition, guests can give separate ‘subscores’ in crucial areas, such as location, cleanliness, staff, comfort, facilities, value for money and free Wi-Fi. Note that guests submit their subscores and their overall scores independently, so there’s no direct link between them. At the guest house, every unit comes with a desk. All units are equipped with a kettle and a private bathroom with a bidet, while selected rooms are fitted with a fully equipped kitchen equipped with a toaster. At the guest house, the units are fitted with bed linen and towels.
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