GAIA'S GARDEN

A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, Second Edition

by TOBY HEMENWAY

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New softcover book, published 209, 316 pages

When it was first published in 2000, the 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. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening - which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants - can take place only on a large, multiacre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a 'backyard ecosystem' by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:

• Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure
• Catching and conserving water in the landscape
• Providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals
• Growing an edible 'forest' that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods

This revised and updated second edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed especially for people in cities and suburbs who have very limited growing space. Whatever size yard or garden you have to work with, you can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful. Best of all, once it’s established, an ecological garden will reduce or eliminate most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

Full colour photos and diagrams throughout.

About the author

Toby Hemenway is an adjunct professor at Portland State University. 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.

Toby wrote the foreword for Heather C. Flores' Food Not Lawns - click here for more information .

See Permaculture books by Bill Mollison click here

Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture Second Edition by Toby Hemenway