Review of Gaia’s Garden
Toby Hemenway's Guide to Homescale Permaculture
In Gaia's Garden, Toby Hemenway presents the theory and practice of Permaculture, and brings them home to the average backyard. A challenge no gardener can miss out on.
A way of life
The topic of Toby Hemenway’s topic in Gaia’s Garden is gardening. The reader can stop at that, but he has the option of letting it be about so much more: a book about a way of life.
Rest assured that, in both cases, Toby Hemenway is the kind of guide you would wish for. He is an insightful theorist: a professionally trained scientist and expert in ecological design. He has a lot of experience under his belt: he is an editor of The Permaculture Activist magazine and practices what he preaches in his own garden. He is also a natural teacher and an eloquent, often poetic writer.
The Permaculture garden
Gaia’s Garden is really about the ecological garden, and more specifically the permaculture garden. The word “Permaculture” (often capitalized) was coined by the Australian ecologists David Holmgren and Bill Mollison. It is about designing human habitats and communities with sustainable land use and food production systems.
Permaculture is a culture – of human landscapes and human acts within them, like building, planting, and uses of technology – that strives to be long-term and permanent. It realizes that it can attain this only by building and maintaining communities and systems that are
- in keeping with our stewardship of the earth by harmonizing with the natural world and promoting biodiversity,
- modeled after nature, mimicking nature’s awesome wisdom and “furiously efficiency” to thrive,
- sustainable by using only renewable resources,
- optimally self-sustainable ecologies requiring little human input and, therefore, human bungling.
The “garden” – the place of food production - is central to these designs. The plantings of annuals and perennials are integrated in the climate, soil, water, microorganisms, insects, and wildlife. The intention is to attain a synergetic relationship between all these elements by mimicking natural processes of soil-building and fertility maintenance, pest control and irrigation, to name but a few.
The garden like a Forest
Hemenway brings the lessons of Permaculture home to the backyard - from the ¼ acre suburban plot to the small family farm. Such a permaculture garden, it goes without saying, looks very different from your average backyard.
No neat rows of broccoli and lettuce here, and least of all an American Lawn (that “schizophrenic” “immature ecosystem”). No artificial fertilizers, pesticides, or machine-driven irrigation systems, no tilling and only a minimum of mulching. Vegetables, herbs, flowers, shrubs and trees serving several functions together, like food-bearing hedges (“fedges”) and air-conditioning trees. A haven for harmless bugs and wildlife as soil builders, pollinators and natural predators of pests.
Hemenway calls it “edible landscape meets wildlife gardening”.
A gardening manual
With handy checklists, diagrams, maps and sketches, Gaia’s Garden helps you design, build and maintain such a paradise. In the first part, “The Garden as Ecosystem,” he provides a fascinating introduction to the science of plant and animal life, for instance in the wonderful bit on “How humus is made”.
Then he offers practical advice about
- bringing the soil to life
- catching, conserving and using water
- plants for many uses, beginning with trees
- bringing in the bees, birds, and other helpful animals
An even more detailed part follows on how to assemble your garden. Hemenway often waxes poetic and brings a great deal of refreshing humor to bear on his subject. Combine this with his engaging writing style and there is hardly a dry passage in the book. Read, for instance, in such gems of writing as “An Intimate Way of Guild-building,” which lays out the principles of plant communities and the complex webs of life within them (“Solanaceae are narcissistic”).
Hemenway also dares to be polemic: he pleads for the usefulness of invasive exotics, condemns excessive human intervention in nature, and petitions less consumption and more self-reliance.
Still, Gaia’s Garden is not “an eco-fanatic’s manifesto.” It is, first and foremost, a gardening manual. As such it will inform and regale the beginner and the expert gardener, the permaculture believer and the skeptic. And if it directs the reader to a more ecological way of living, so much the better.
- Gaia's Garden is published by the Chelsea Green Publishing Company.
