Review of Gaia's Garden
A guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
by: Toby Hemingway
pub: 2001
The author of "Gaia's Garden" has been posting on
Permaculture discussion lists for a few years and
writes for the magazine "Permaculture Activist".
I believe this is the first book on Permaculture
written in the US with examples from this area.
The major sections of the book are:
* The Garden as Ecosystem
* The Pieces of the Ecological Garden
* Assembling the Ecological Garden
Viewing Permaculture from a gardeners perspective
makes sense to me. If any activity is at the
heart of sustainable/Permaculture philosophy it
will involve our relationship with plants and
for most of us that means gardening.
The book has lots of drawings and mixes small amounts
of philosophy with examples. As with most Permaculture
books the standard design techniques are introduced
with many examples.
Some quotes from the book:
Permaculture is a set of techniques and principles
for designing sustainable human settlements.
Every bit of food, every scrap of lumber, each
medicinal herb or other human product that comes
from an urban yard means that one less chunk of
land outside the cities needs needs to be denuded
of natives and developed for human use.
Briefly, the steps in creating an ecological garden
design are:
*Observation: Here we ask; What do we have to work
with? What are the conditions and
constraints of the site?
*Visioning: What should the design do? What do
we want? What does the site need?
How should it feel?
*Planning: What do we need to make our ideas
happen? How should the pieces be
assembled?
*Development: What will the final design look
like? How will we make it happen?
*Implementation: The final step: How to install
the garden.
This last set of quotes sound too much like engineering
for me, but i think they do reflect mainstream Permaculture.
Throughout the book i had several small disagreements involving
emphasis and design philosophy but still liked the book very much.
If you live in Oregon the libraries now have this book so
check it out!
jeff
