Chaya’s Review: Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway

Note:  We do not sell Gaia’s Garden.  We thoroughly enjoyed the book and would like to share our opinion of it with you as well as some basic Permaculture principles that you can find within its’ pages.  If you would like to read the book for yourself, you can find it here.

Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway

 

What is Permaculture? Hemenway barely catches his breath when he tackles this question, and I’m rather glad he did in his typical systematic way because I’m asked this constantly in different forms—“What makes it different than organic gardening?”, “Isn’t that gardening-for-hippies?”.  Just last week I was asked, “If my mom went to a Permaculture meeting, would she just think it was another gardening club?”

 

“Permanent Culture” and “Permanent Agriculture” have joined to mean an interconnected ecosystem that is rich, diverse, and healthy by stacking the functions of the soil, water, and animal life.  Every piece of the garden impacts the other living organisms in that garden and you plan accordingly.  For instance, one plant attracts a pesky insect, another attracts the bird that dines on them.  You have now created a relationship between two otherwise unrelated plants.  Perhaps one of those plants is also known to improve the nitrogen content of the soil, but another needs strong nitrogen to flourish.   What that means is that the end goal isn’t just food or floral output.  It isn’t just about attracting birds or butterflies, nor is it just about preventing soil erosion or even just about rich soil. It’s about all of it—and using all of the pieces simultaneously to improve the quality of the other pieces.

 

It’s more of a gardening paradigm.  Organic gardening refers more to what is not done to the plants; it does not necessarily encompass the sets of processes by which those plants are grown (i.e., irrigation, recycling, composting, monoculture vs. polyculture, or harvesting practices).  Organic principles are excellent and Permaculture utilizes those, but it does not stop there.

 

And as for your mother, would she think it was another gardening club?  I would hope she’d bring her experience to the table for others and walk away with a few solutions, a few “never-thought-of-that” moments, and a few new friends.  She would likely see some distinct differences in approach.

Gardening Pottery

This book opened my eyes to both the beauty and purpose to ecological design.  It is not about color coordinating flowers.  It’s about creating a living, multifunctional, thriving ecosystem.  One of Hemenway’s stronger suggestions is to think of your garden in terms of zones.  Start right out your door!  Zone 1 is where you spend the most time, and so it needs to be logical for you; what do you need most from the garden?  This zone is also for those high maintenance plants, like things that will need to be covered and uncovered during those frosty nights, or the herbs that are easily choked out by weeds.  If this is out your door, you are far more likely to pick a weed here, or notice yellowing leaves in time to apply much needed water. These are your most utilized plants (if you eat tomatoes everyday in the summer, for instance) and the plants that are the neediest to grow. The zones going out from there should require less care, eventually leading to the “food forest” zone that only requires minimal maintenance.  In this way, you can increase your garden production without enslaving yourself to the garden.

 

Hemenway also focuses heavily upon multifunctionalism, and it’s this emphasis that brings the best charts to this book!  You can see the many functions of many, many plants in order to plan your garden for optimal performance.  He speaks of “stacking functions”; if every carefully chosen plant provides multiple things to the garden, and multiple things in the garden provide each one of those functions, you will not have a “weak link”.  No plant only does one thing and yet many of us grew up gardening that way.  For instance I have always loved lavender and used to grow it for the beauty in the garden and as a cut bouquet.  Apart from beauty and scent, what role does this single plant play?

 

A chart on page 278 shows this to grow well in my current zone (yay!) and shows that it’s an evergreen shrub (meaning that it retains foliage all year around and is a woody perennial with multiple stems arising from the base) and it does prefer full sun.  Okay, so most gardening books would have told me as much.  But continuing on I can now see the multiple functions of lavender: It does have aesthetic uses (as I mentioned),  and it’s a wonderfully plant for human medicinal use.

Bee on Lavender

It attracts many beneficial insects, it’s a windbreak species, and it’s also a hedgerow species.

Lavender as a hedge

So perhaps I can plant it next to species that need pollinating insects, perhaps I can plant that tender partial-shade plant next to it that would benefit from the wind break, and it would make a wonderful border to separate garden areas.  This is what garden design and “stacking functions” is all about.  Now, “Butterfly Bush” has the same windbreak and insectary functions, and would look quite nice interplanted.  Why repeat myself? Because if something were to happen to one plant, I have a backup plan!

 

If a chicken is something that only outputs eggs, then it is hard to understand Permaculture.  But if you look at a chicken as something that eats insects, and that my garden is an insect nursery.

Chicken in garden

Consider further that if I require the outputs of both the chicken and the garden—now you can see that stacking the functions is beneficial for every living thing involved.  My backyard (whether I realize it or not) is a complex ecosystem.  If I address it as such, start stacking the functions of all the components involved, now I am practicing Permaculture.

 

I have spent much of my life fighting the natural succession of plant life; I never understood the greater principles at work.  Think of plant succession as linear.  Bare earth, followed by fast-growing weeds and grasses.

prairie grasses in Colorado

These would then be replaced by taller perennial grasses and bushes.  Animal and bird life really move in at this stage, bringing life, insect management, and fertilizer.  Ultimately, grass lands are teenagers striving for the “adulthood” of forest.  This explains all of the thousands of oak saplings I’ve pulled from between my peony buses!  Those “weeds” are part of the process of healing barren earth.  The roots penetrate hard ground, the weeds die back and compost, and there is now food for a whole host of other living creatures.  Left alone that oak would start producing leaf litter by the metric ton adding precious organic matter to the soil.  How do we get this process to work for us?

 

Hemenway does a great job—better than I—of explaining these principles and giving practical application in this Permaculture primer.  The photos were inspirational.  I have seen mature permacultured gardens firsthand and so I know the wisdom of this methodology.  I didn’t know quite where to begin myself, though, until Gaia’s garden.  I now have a starting point.

 

Design, water constraints and solutions, extending the growing seasons, utilizing microclimates, building humus-rich soil, balancing the insect and animal life, developing nurse plant relationships, how to interplant for maximum production, and “guild building”—this book was not like the other gardening books I have read in the past.

 

The Negatives

 

For those of us who look at this amazing design and see a Designer, we often have to swallow the meat and spit out the bones of the modern evolutionary cliché.  I have heard Hemenway lecture with tremendous passion about Permaculture in which he makes great conclusions based on evolutionary assumptions.  I would depart with Hemenway in his assumptions, but his conclusions for a positive way forward are largely correct. Moreover Hemenway approaches Permaculture with a heavy hand in science (which I love), so his conclusions are even more convincing.  This book does reflect his evolutionary paradigm but is not heavy-handed with it.

 

I am naive enough that I did not know where the title came from—“who’s Gaia?”  According to some traditions, she is the goddess of earth.  Apart from the title of the book, there is no other mention of her.  I did see a pagan paradigm come through in the smallest of ways, such as the personification of earth as “mother”.  Again, those of us who worship the Creator and not the creation can agree with the large strokes of the conclusions but disagree with the philosophical underpinnings.

 

Conclusion

 

I could say that this book, listening to Paul Wheaton’s podcasts, along with the documentary “Back to Eden” have shifted my gardening approach 180 degrees.  I think that if you have the least bit of curiosity towards Permaculture, or if you have watched “Back to Eden” but do not know where to start, this book will put feet to that vision!

 

 


 

 

Photo credits:

Gardening pottery 

Lavender as insectary

Lavender as hedge row

Chicken in garden

Prairie grass

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