Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture - 2nd Edition

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Gaia’s Garden is simply the best permaculture book ever written, and is in the running for best gardening book ever written. No one should be without it.” Gaia's Gardenis a collaboration between Culture Mile, Play Nice, property developers Dominvs Group, and a little-known outfitcalled'the Barbican'. Conceptualised by five young, female creatives from different disciplines, the idea is to present sustainability through an inclusive, feminist lens. Well, a new oneis opening this week right in the middle of thecity. Throughout the summerGaia's Garden, located by Holborn Viaduct, is going tohost daily cultural, arts and sustainability workshops for the local community. Photo: Francis Augusto Nothing quite like a community space, is there? Everyone pitching in. Olderpeople mingling with the young. People walking around with spades. It's like a glimpse into a Utopian future where we all live on communes and there's no money or internet. As an adventurous young Dutchman Gerard, alias Kireet, travelled the world over with his friend Rob in 1970s. After deciding to make Auroville his home he became instrumental in water conservation efforts leading to an improved water table for both Auroville and the surrounding villages. Previously a teacher in the Netherlands and understanding the value education, he founded and financed a school for the local Tamil children. In Auroville’s Gaia’s Garden (the first one in the Netherlands) he designed each room to be larger than usual with adjacent flower filled terraces and a pond on the ground floor. The Dutch love gardening, pets and traveling!

In the revised, second edition of Gaia’s Garden , Toby Hemenway extends his expert knowledge of permaculture to urban and suburban landscapes. A perfect beginner’s guide to ecological gardening, Gaia’s Garden dispels the notion that meaningful gardening can only take place on a large piece of land with lots of space to grow.Gaia’s Garden is the best-selling permaculture book in the world. The enlarged, updated 2nd edition is the winner of the 2011 Nautilus Gold Medal Award. The best part of this book is the way Hemenway teaches the critical thinking skills to apply permaculture principles in many different settings. Many "homesteading" books fail because they are based in one climate or assume a certain size yard. This book instead looks at the basic structures found in all ecological communities, and then examines different ways they manifest in different settings (in nature and in the garden/farm). Then he teases out the differences and asks what are the different plants reacting to and why? So the reader gains general tools and also the skill to apply them, with the added bonus that most examples were chosen for their relevance to North American climate and soil, so US-based readers can try them out first before striking out on their own designs. 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. We are experiencing a watershed moment, not only in terms of the reclaiming of public space for community engagement, but in the recognition that collective change must be built from collective engagement.

Moving from theory toward practice, the second part of the book looks at the pieces of the ecological garden. A chapter each delves into soil (chapter 4), water (chapter 5), plants (chapter 6), and animals (chapter 7), but from a different perspective from that of most garden books. Instead of viewing soil, water, plants, and animals as static, as objects to be manipulated into doing what we want, I treat them as dynamic and constantly evolving, as having their own qualities that need to be understood to work with them successfully, and as intricately connected to all the other parts of the garden. This revised and updated edition also features a new chapter on urban permaculture, designed for people in cities and suburbs with 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 work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden. Ideally, we would publish every review we receive, whether positive or negative. However, we won’t display any review that includes or refers to (among other things): Planet earth our mother, our home. Gaia, a name from Greek mythology for the goddess of the earth. A complex living entity. She is a dynamic web of systems involving the earth’s atmosphere, biosphere, oceans, and soil. Our planet acts as a whole to create and maintain optimum conditions for life to exist. The whole world is undergoing a change, a crisis of transformation individually and collectively as a global community.

You can't claim to be no-carbon-impact and off the grid if you're on the internet. The internet is the griddiest grid that ever gridded. In accordance with government guidelines to minimise transmission of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), this property can only accept bookings from essential workers/permitted travellers, during dates where such guidelines exist. Reasonable evidence must be provided on arrival. If it isn't provided, your booking will be cancelled on arrival. Contributions should be appropriate for a global audience. Please avoid using profanity or attempts to approximate profanity with creative spelling, in any language. Comments and media that include 'hate speech', discriminatory remarks, threats, sexually explicit remarks, violence, and the promotion of illegal activity are not permitted. In accordance with government guidelines to minimise transmission of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), this property may request additional documentation from guests to validate identity, travel itinerary and other relevant information, during dates where such guidelines exist. TL;DR I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in designing and creating a permaculture or ecological garden of their own. 4/5 stars.

I've found now a few different "comprehensive teach yourself permaculture" books, each tailored to a different audience. Food Not Lawns for the punks and the community organizers, The Urban Homestead for the busy, The Transition Companion for the big picture people and Toolbox for Sustainable Living for the tinkerers. Gaia's Garden stands above these books for its general appeal, a guidebook in clear, flowing language for understanding and working with the ecology of cultivated environments. Anyone else who spots something suspicious can always report it to our Customer Service team, so our Fraud team can investigate. Sidebars: lanto Evans’s Polyculture, Jajarkot’s Advanced Polyculture, Growing the Three Sisters GuildIt's internally inconsistent. "Work with nature. Be minimal in your designs." But also, step 1, do major earthworks, step 2, install a humongous water cistern and a bunch of plastic watering tubes. There's plenty of that disconnect in this book. Swear words, sexual references, hate speech, discriminatory remarks, threats, or references to violence This book is quite the game changer if you, like me, had a very traditional understanding of gardening and what a garden should look like. As a designer, it completely changed my way of seeing landscaping and what a landscape should look like and work like. This book teaches the basics of permaculture in a practical, non preachy way. It helps you design a forest garden, gives you the bases to work with large scale gardens and small scale gardens -though the actual small scale gardens could use more information, I'm sure there's other books on small spaces. What's important is that once you understand the principles -the major one can be summed up in: nature is doing fine without you, maybe you should let her do her thing- the garden looks like a completely different canvas. It's not 'how can it look good?' but 'what is missing in this ecosystem?'. Why wasn't I thinking about gardens as ecosystems? Manakula Vinayagar Temple is 8.1 km from the accommodation, while Pondicherry Museum is 8.4 km away. The nearest airport is Puducherry, 9 km from Gaia's Garden Guest House, and the property offers a paid airport shuttle service.