A Guide To Home-Scale Permaculture

245 Pages·2011·16.31 MB·English

by  Hemenway, Toby

Copyright © 2000, 2009 by Toby Hemenway

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs copyright © 2009 Toby Hemenway. Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations copyright © 2009 Elayne Sears.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hemenway, Toby, 1952-
Gaia’s garden : a guide to home-scale permaculture / Toby Hemenway. -- 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60358-029-8
1. Natural landscaping. 2. Organic gardening. 3. Permaculture. 4. Gaia hypothesis. I. Title.

SB439.H44 2009
635’.048--dc22

2009000785

Chelsea Green Publishing Company
Post Office Box 428
White River Junction, VT 05001
[phone]
www.chelseagreen.com
For Kiel

And in loving memory of my parents,
Tee and Jackie,
and my sister Leslie
Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

PART ONE - The Garden as Ecosystem
CHAPTER ONE - Introducing the Ecological Garden

Gardens that Really Work with Nature
Why Is Gardening So Much Work?
Beyond—Way Beyond—Natural Gardening
The Natives versus Exotics Debate
Making the Desert Bloom, Sustainably
How to Use This Book

CHAPTER TWO - A Gardener’s Ecology

Three Ecological Principles
A Mature Garden
A Few of Nature’s Tricks for Gardeners

CHAPTER THREE - Designing the Ecological Garden

Natural Patterns in the Garden
The Ecological Design Process

PART TWO - The Pieces of the Ecological Garden
CHAPTER FOUR - Bringing the Soil to Life

Soil Life: The First Recyclers
Building Soil Life
Sharing the Wealth of the Soil

CHAPTER FIVE - Catching, Conserving, and Using Water

The Fivefold Path to Water Wisdom
Conserving Water with Catchment
Water Brings the Garden to Life

CHAPTER 6 - Plants for Many Uses

The Many Roles of a Tree
Multipurpose Plants
The Roles of Plants in the Ecological Theater
Annuals and Perennials
Microclimates for the Garden
Nurses, Scaffolds, and Chaperones
Summary: Blending the Many Functions of Plants

CHAPTER 7 - Bringing in the Bees, Birds, and Other Helpful Animals

More Good Bugs than Bad
Attracting Beneficial Insects
The Gardener’s Feathered Friends
Other Backyard Helpers

PART THREE - Assembling the Ecological Garden
CHAPTER 8 - Creating Communities for the Garden

Interplanting and Beyond
Guilding the Garden

CHAPTER 9 - Designing Garden Guilds
An Intimate Way of Guild-Building
Guilds for Bookworms
Function-Stacking in Guilds
Creating a Superguild
Guilds Aren’t Perfect

CHAPTER 10 - Growing a Food Forest

Experimenting with Forest Gardens
The Seven-Story Garden
How the Food Forest Evolves

CHAPTER 11 - Permaculture Gardening in the City

The Edge of the City
Small Space, Big City
Expanding Gardens in Time
Finding Your Urban Garden
Urban Animals: Domestic, Wild, and Feral
Form, Function, and City Permaculture

CHAPTER 12 - Pop Goes the Garden

Choosing the Right Pieces
The Garden Gets Popping
Assembling the Garden Revisited
APPENDIX - A Sampling of Useful Plants
Glossary
Bibliography
Resources
Index
About the Author
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
When the first edition of Gaia’s Garden was in press, the staff at Chelsea Green, my agent, and I had animated discussions about whether the word
permaculture should appear on the cover of the book. Back in 2000, few people had heard the term, and we all had our doubts about using it. Would the
word entice potential readers or just baffle them? In the intervening years, permaculture, though it hasn’t quite become a household word, has popped up
in the media, been taught at several dozen universities, and grown a grassroots network of many thousands of practitioners. Hence, in this edition I felt
comfortable with dipping a little deeper into the nature of permaculture. If you still don’t know what permaculture is, the first chapter will help explain it.
Although permaculture embraces many disciplines, most people come to it through gardening and their love of plants. Thus, though the permacultural
aspects of this book are more overt in this expanded edition, the book remains garden focused rather than a sweeping guide to all aspects of
sustainability.
A second change needing some explanation has occurred in the years since the first edition. When I first wrote Gaia’s Garden, we lived on ten mostly
forested acres outside Oakland, Oregon, a village of 850 in very rural Douglas County. This was where I learned the concepts and methods described in
the book, and I refer to our Oakland home often. But life is constant change, and many circumstances, including the success of this book, meant that we
needed to be nearer to people. We have since moved north by a three-hour drive to Portland, Oregon, and now live on a small urban lot. This forced two
changes in the book: The references to our southern Oregon home are now in the past tense, and I have added a chapter on urban permaculture
gardening. The book’s focus has always been on the typical North American yard of one-quarter acre or less, but city living and landscaping pose a
unique set of challenges and opportunities for ecological gardening in smaller spaces. Since three-quarters of the people on this continent live in
metropolitan areas, I wanted to provide all of us, even those with no yard at all, with tools for using our landscapes to reduce our ecological footprint and
become more self-reliant, while enhancing habitat for increasingly threatened wildlife.
This book began when I visited a garden that felt unlike any I had seen.
Walking in an ancient forest or snorkeling in a coral reef, I have felt an aliveness, a sense of many interlocking pieces clicking together into a living and
dynamic whole. These are places that naturally exude abundance. Sadly, this feeling was lacking in any human-made landscape I had experienced.
Natural landscapes seem so rich; they seethe with activity; they hum with life in comparison to our own. Why is it that nature can splash riotous abundance
across forest or prairie with careless grace, while we humans struggle to grow a few flowers? Why do our gardens offer so little to the rest of life? Our
yards seem so one-dimensional, just simple places that offer a few vegetables or flowers, if that much. Yet nature can do a thousand things at once: feed
insects and birds, snakes and deer, and offer them shelter; harvest, store, and purify water; renew and enrich the soil; clean the air and scent it with
perfume; and on and on.
Then I encountered a garden that had the vivid aliveness of nature, yet it was packed with fruit and edible greens. Soon I found a few others like it. In
these places, using new techniques from permaculture and ecological design and old ones from indigenous people and organic gardening, a growing
band of pioneers has created landscapes that feel like nature but provide an abundant home for people as well. These are true backyard ecosystems that
were designed with methods and concepts gleaned from nature and that feel as alive as any forest. I wanted to know how to create these places, and I
wanted to help others create more. Gaia’s Garden is the result.
These gardens represent a new landscape, one that provides for people as well as for the rest of nature. You could think of them as “edible landscaping
meets wildlife gardening,” but they are more than that. These are true backyard ecosystems—not just disconnected fragments—that are as resilient,
diverse, productive, and beautiful as those in nature. They are not merely flowery showplaces or ruler-straight arrays of row crops. Yet they also are not the
brambly tangles that identify many wildlife gardens. They are places where conscious design has been melded with a respect and understanding of
nature’s principles. The result is a living and riotously abundant landscape in which all the pieces work together to yield food, flowers, medicinal and
edible herbs, even craft supplies and income for the human inhabitants, while providing diverse habitat for helpful insects, birds, and other wildlife. Places
where nature does most of the work, but where people are as welcome as the other inhabitants of Earth.
Although this book is about environmentally friendly landscapes, it is not an eco-fanatic’s manifesto. It’s a book on gardening, full of techniques and
garden lore. But between the lines on these pages is a plea for less consumption and more self-reliance. Anyone who would pick up this book is probably
familiar with the environmental destruction humans have wrought in the past few decades, so I’m not going to assault my readers with grim statistics.
Suffice it to say that we have to do better. This book is an attempt to show one way to proceed. Our home landscapes consume immense amounts of
resources—far more water, fertilizer, and pesticides per acre than any industrialized farm. And providing for our needs spurs relentless conversion of wild
land into factory farms and industrial forests. Yet our yards, city parks, curbsides, even parking lots and office courtyards could become lush, productive,
and attractive landscapes that aid nature while yielding much for us as well, instead of being the grassy voids that they are now. This book shows how to
do this, using techniques and examples devised by the pioneers of the sustainable-landscaping movement.
This book is an introduction to ecological and permacultural landscaping. Gaia’s Garden is not an introductory gardening book—I assume that most of
my readers have done a little gardening—but I do attempt to explain some new techniques and concepts well enough for novice gardeners to implement
them. Many of the subjects touched on here are large enough to deserve a book of their own, so lamentably I’ve had to limit how deeply I plunge into some
fascinating topics. This may be frustrating to some readers, but I’ve included an annotated bibliography and a resources section to allow further pursuit of
these subjects.
Most plants mentioned in the text are identified by common name to avoid the Latinate bafflement that botanical nomenclature can inflict on many
gardeners. For a few unusual or ambiguous species, I’ve added the botanical name. The various tables and lists of plants are alphabetized by common
name, but in those I have included the botanical name as well, as that is the only way to be sure we’re all talking about the same species.
With hundreds of thousands of plant species to choose from, these tables cannot hope to be comprehensive lists of all useful plants, but I hope my
selections will provide readers with a broad palette from which to choose. To represent the wide variety of geographic regions on this continent, I’ve also
tried to give examples from many areas and for different climates. More Americans now live west of the Mississippi than east of it, and this book reflects
that bicoastal reality.
Most of the ideas in this book aren’t mine. Many of the techniques shown here have been practiced by indigenous people for millennia or worked out by
gardeners of all stripes. They have also been compiled in the ever-broadening array of books on ecological design and permaculture. In this book, I’ve
attempted to synthesize these permacultural ideas with ecologists’ growing understanding of what makes nature work. I can claim credit for few of the
techniques and concepts described here, merely for the way some of them are presented. And of course, any errors are my own.

Numerous people unselfishly gave me their time, collaboration, hard work, and support. For inspiration, suggestions, and for their development of the
ideas of permaculture, my first and biggest thanks go to Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. For touring me through their gardens and for their generosity I
thank—in alphabetical order—Earle Barnhart, Douglas Bullock, Joe Bullock, Sam Bullock, Kevin Burkhart, Doug Clayton, Joel Glanzberg, Ben Haggard,
Marvin Hegge, the much-missed Simon Henderson, Alan Kapuler, Brad Lancaster, Penny Livingston, Art Ludwig, Vicki Marvick, Anne Nelson, Jerome
Osentowski, John Patterson, Barbara Rose, Julia Russell, James Stark, Roxanne Swentzell, Tom Ward, and Mary Zemach. For support and fruitful ideas I
thank Peter Bane, Bill Burton, Brock Dolman, Ianto Evans, Heather Flores, Jude Hobbs, Dave Jacke, Keith Johnson, Mark Lakeman, Michael Lockman,
Scott Pittman, Bill Roley, Larry and Kathryn Santoyo, Michael Smith, John Valenzuela, and Rick Valley. For assuring me that books were not as hard to
write as I feared, a special thanks to Stuart Cowan. To my agent, Natasha Kern, I owe a huge debt for her perseverance, ideas, tenacity, and steadfast
confidence and support. Thanks also to my editors, Rachael Cohen and Ben Watson, who have smoothed the text considerably, tidied up my grammatical
excesses, and guided me through the labyrinthine process of publication. The staff at Chelsea Green have been a pleasure to collaborate with. And for a
thousand graces, large and small, while I twice disappeared into this book, I am grateful to my wife and soulmate, Kiel.
TOBY HEMENWAY
PART ONE
The Garden as Ecosystem
CHAPTER ONE
Introducing the Ecological Garden
The movement toward sustainable landscaping is heating up. Gardeners are increasingly burying their resource-guzzling, zero-habitat lawns under native-
plant gardens, wildlife-attracting thickets, and sun-dappled woodlands. It’s an encouraging trend, this movement toward more ecologically sound, nature-
friendly yards.
Yet not everyone is on board. Some gardeners hesitate to go natural because they can’t see where, for example, the orderly rows of a vegetable
garden fit into this wilder style. What will happen to those luscious beefsteak tomatoes? Or ornamental plants—does sustainable gardening mean tearing
out a treasured cut-flower bed or pulling up grandmother’s heirloom roses to make room for a natural-looking landscape?
Nurturing wildlife and preserving native species are admirable goals, but how do people fit into these natural landscapes? No gardener wants to feel
like a stranger in her own backyard. Gardeners who refuse to be excluded from their own yards, but love nature, have been forced to create fragmented
gardens: an orderly vegetable plot here, flower beds there, and a corner for wildlife or a natural landscape. And each of these fragments has its
weaknesses. A vegetable garden doesn’t offer habitat to native insects, birds, and other wildlife. Quite the contrary—munching bugs and birds are
unwelcome visitors. The flower garden, however much pleasure the blooms provide, can’t feed the gardener. And a wildlife garden often looks unkempt
and provides little for people other than the knowledge that it’s good for wild creatures.
This book shows how to integrate these isolated and incomplete pieces into a vigorous, thriving backyard ecosystem that benefits both people and
wildlife. These gardens are designed using the same principles that nature uses to create healthy plant communities, so that the different plantings and
other elements interconnect and nurture one another.
Ecological gardens meld the best features of wildlife gardens, edible landscapes, and conventional flower and vegetable gardens, but they go beyond
simply adding these styles together. They are more than the sum of their parts. An ecological garden feels like a living being, with a character and
essence that is unique to each. These gardens are grounded in relatively new concepts such as permaculture and ecological design, but they use time-
tested techniques honed to perfection by indigenous people, restoration ecologists, organic farmers, and cutting-edge landscape designers. They
combine low environmental impact, low maintenance (once established), and high yields with elegant aesthetics. Gaia’s Garden provides tools to
understand, design, and construct these backyard ecosystems so they will benefit people and the rest of nature as well.
Ecological gardens are filled with beautiful plants that have many uses, providing fruit and vegetables, medicinal and culinary herbs, eye-catching
arrays of colorful blossoms, soil-building mulch, protection from pests, and habitat for wildlife. With thousands of plant species to choose from, we can find
plenty that do several of these jobs at once. Multifunctional plants are a hallmark of gardens based on ecological principles: that’s how nature works. We
can choose food plants that support insects and other wildlife, herbs that break up hardpan, cover crops that are edible, or trees that add nutrients to the
soil.

Permaculture designer Larry Santoyo of Earthflow Design Works aimed to integrate the greater watershed landscape into this urban Santa Barbara,
California, garden. Built at the base of a mountain, the garden was reoriented into terrace beds and pathways that flow along the contour lines to capture
precious runoff in the arid climate. An arbor built from locally harvested bamboo frames the view of the neighboring gardens, provides vertical growing
area for kiwi vines and wisteria, and creates a zone to rest and relax. Japanese persimmon and citrus trees are mulched with living groundcovers of
drought-resistant nasturtium, Mexican primrose (Oenothera speciosa), thyme, and calendula.
These landscapes can even yield income from edible and medicinal plants, seeds and nursery stock, or dried flowers, and provide construction or craft
materials such as lumber, bamboo poles, basket willow, and vegetable dyes. Yet in a garden designed along ecological principles, birds and other
animals feel just as welcome in these living landscapes as the gardener. With good design these gardens need only infrequent watering, and the soil
renews itself rather than demanding heavy fertilizing. These are living ecosystems, designed using nature’s rules and boasting the lushness and
resilience of the natural environment.
What Is Permaculture?
I refer often in this book to permaculture and ecological design, two closely related subjects on 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 uses a set of principles and practices to design sustainable human settlements. The word, a contraction of both “permanent culture”
and “permanent agriculture,” was coined by two Australians. The first was Bill Mollison, a charismatic and iconoclastic one-time forester,
schoolteacher, trapper, field naturalist, and author of the dense and encyclopedic bible of the field, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual. The other is
David Holmgren, one of the first of Bill’s many students, who has brilliantly expanded permaculture’s scope.
Mollison says the original idea for permaculture came to him in 1959 when he was observing marsupials browsing in Tasmanian rain forests.
Inspired and awed by the life-giving abundance and rich interconnectedness of this ecosystem, he 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, using what they had observed in nature and in indigenous
cultures, began to identify the principles that made those systems so rich and sustainable. Their hope was to apply these principles to designing
ecologically sound, productive landscapes. They reasoned that if life had been thriving on Earth for over three billion years, if indigenous peoples had
been living relatively harmoniously in their environments for millennia, then life and indigenous cultures must have figured out some things about
sustainability. David’s undergraduate thesis, which he and Bill revised and expanded, evolved into the groundbreaking book Permaculture One.
Permaculture began, then, as a set of tools for designing landscapes that are modeled after nature, yet include humans, and this book—once we get
the definition of permaculture out of the way—will focus on the landscape-design aspect of permaculture. But Mollison, Holmgren, and those who came
after them quickly realized that even if we learn to create farms, gardens, and landscapes that mimic nature, a sustainable land use that is embedded
in an unsustainable society won’t prevent our tenure on this planet from being short, increasingly impoverished, or both. However, it turns out that
permaculture’s principles—since they are grounded in nature’s wisdom—have breathtaking scope, far beyond permaculture’s origins in agriculture.
Permaculture has been used to design buildings, energy and wastewater systems, villages, and even less tangible structures such as school curricula,
businesses, community groups, and decision-making processes.
How does permaculture do this? Though on one level permaculture practitioners design with organisms, buildings, and those less tangibles that we
refer to as invisible structures, they focus less on the objects themselves than on the careful design of relationships among them—interconnections
—that will create a healthy, sustainable whole. These relationships are what turn a collection of unrelated parts into a functioning system, whether it’s a
backyard, a community, or an ecosystem.
If this still seems a mite theoretical, here is a more down-to-earth definition of permaculture. If we think of practices like organic gardening, recycling,
natural building, renewable energy, and even consensus decision-making and social-justice efforts as tools for sustainability, then permaculture is the
toolbox that helps us organize and decide when and how to use those tools. Permaculture is not a discipline in itself but rather a design approach
based on connecting different disciplines, strategies, and techniques. It, like nature, uses and melds the best features of whatever is available to it.
Some people new to this approach think of permaculture as a set of techniques. Although there are certain methods that are used often because they
illustrate permaculture principles beautifully, such as herb spirals and keyhole beds (which you’ll see in the following pages), there are few, if any,
techniques that belong only to permaculture. Permaculturists employ techniques from a broad range of disciplines, but these tools are selected and
applied according to how well they allow permaculture’s principles to be applied, not because a particular method is “how we do it in permaculture.”
In a culture that focuses on things rather than on relationships, permaculture’s emphasis on connections instead of “stuff” can make it tricky to
explain. Some beginning permaculturists have annoyed advocates of various sustainable practices by saying “permaculture includes organic
gardening (or solar energy, or natural building).” But rather than absorbing those disciplines or considering them as part of (and thus smaller than) it,
permaculture shows us where and how to apply these important ideas. It is a linking science.
The aim of permaculture is to design ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities. It is guided by a set of ethics: caring for
Earth, caring for people, and reinvesting the surplus that this care will create. From these ethics stem a set of design guidelines or principles,
described in many places and in slightly varying forms. The list below is the version I use, compiled with the aid of many permaculture teachers and
flowing from the work of Mollison, Holmgren, and their coauthors.
Permaculture Principles
A. Core Principles for Ecological Design
1. Observe. Use protracted and thoughtful observation rather than prolonged and thoughtless action. Observe the site and its elements in all
seasons. Design for specific sites, clients, and cultures.
2. Connect. Use relative location, that is, place the elements of your design in ways that create useful relationships and time-saving connections
among all parts. The number of connections among elements creates a healthy, diverse ecosystem, not the number of elements.
3. Catch and store energy and materials. Identify, collect, and hold useful flows. Every cycle is an opportunity for yield, every gradient (in slope,
charge, temperature, and the like) can produce energy. Reinvesting resources builds capacity to capture yet more resources.
4. Each element performs multiple functions. Choose and place each element in a design to perform as many functions as possible. Beneficial
connections between diverse components create a stable whole. Stack elements in both space and time.
5. Each function is supported by multiple elements. Use multiple methods to achieve important functions and to create synergies. Redundancy
protects when one or more elements fail.
6. Make the least change for the greatest effect. Understand the system you are working with well enough to find its “leverage points” and intervene
there, where the least work accomplishes the most change.
7. Use small-scale, intensive systems. Start at your doorstep with the smallest systems that will do the job and build on your successes. Grow by
“chunking”—that is, developing a small system or arrangement that works well—and repeat it, with variations.
8. Optimize edge. The edge—the intersection of two environments—is the most diverse place in a system and is where energy and materials
accumulate or are translated. Increase or decrease edge as appropriate.
9. Collaborate with succession. Living systems usually advance from immaturity to maturity, and if we accept this trend and align our designs with it
instead of fighting it, we save work and energy. Mature ecosystems are more diverse and productive than young ones.
10. Use biological and renewable resources. Renewable resources (usually living beings and their products) reproduce and build up over time,
store energy, assist yield, and interact with other elements. Favor these over nonrenewable resources.