Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition (2ND ed.) by Toby Hemenway

Gaia's Garden has sparked the imagination of home gardeners the world over by introducing a simple message: working with nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens.

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--even for the beginner--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 a rewilded and biodiverse habitat for beneficial insects, birds, and animals
• Growing an edible "forest" that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and other foods

This revised and updated edition also features a 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.

Table of Contents:

1. Introducing the ecological garden
2. A gardener's ecology
3. Designing the ecological garden
4. Bringing the soil to life
5. Catching, conserving, and using water
6. Plants for many uses
7. Bringing in the bees, birds, and other helpful animals
8. Creating communities for the garden
9. Designing garden guilds
10. Growing a food forest
11. Permaculture gardening in the city
12. Pop goes the garden

Review Quotes:

"Outlines a revolutionary course for the future of gardening and agriculture."--Dr. John Todd, founder of The New Alchemy Institute (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden.)

"Takes the native plants and organic gardening movement to the next level."--Joel M. Lerner, The Washington Post (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden)

"There is so much wisdom in Gaia's Garden that I would need a dozen columns to do it justice. . . a bold, wonderful, nature-embracing and completely sensible vision of the future."--Justin Siskin, Los Angeles Daily News (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden)

"Practical science for making your yard produce food and beauty."--Rose O'Donnell, The Seattle Times (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden)

"A gardener's blueprint for ecological abundance from the ground up."--Steve Spreckel, Acres USA (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden)

"This is a book you will use and re-use, and enjoy having around for a long time."--Peter Bane, The Permaculture Activist (Refers to the first edition of Gaia's Garden)

"Become a sustainable producer of resources instead of a wasteful consumer. This wonderful book shows you how by helping you create and enhance beautiful backyard ecosystems within the garden. Put this book into action, and you'll begin to live an example that positively shifts your own community and beyond. Best of all, doing so with this book is simple, juicy, and fun."--Brad Lancaster, author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond and http: //www.HarvestingRainwater.com

"Toby's fun, well-grounded, and engaging book is fast becoming a classic, and deservedly so. Practical yet visionary, broad-ranging yet focused on the basics one needs to know, this is a great place to start on the permaculture path. The new edition builds solidly on the success of the first. Congratulations!"--Dave Jacke, co-author of the two-volume Edible Forest Gardens

"The world didn't come with an operating manual, so it's a good thing that some wise people have from time to time written them. Gaia's Garden is one of the more important, a book that will be absolutely necessary in the world ahead."--Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy and Hope, Human and Wild

Toby Hemenway was the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, as well as The Permaculture City. 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 at 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. He taught permaculture and consulted and lectured on ecological design throughout the country, and his writing appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. Toby passed away in 2016. Visit his web site at www.patternliteracy.com

Chelsea Green Publishing Company

Pub Date: May 01, 2009

0.8" H x 9.9" L x 7.9" W 

328 pages

paperback