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

The revised and updated edition of the classic guide to ecological gardening for home gardeners to achieve more beautiful, abundant and forgiving gardens of any size

Featuring new guidance on urban permaculture for people with limited growing space

Many people 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. But it’s fun and easy even for beginners 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

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.

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. You can apply basic permaculture principles to make it more diverse, more natural, more productive, and more beautiful no matter what size garden or yard you have.

About the Author:

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.