Permaculture Gardens

"Permaculture Gardens" sparks your imagination, delivering permaculture's most fundamental message to readers: If we work with nature, not against it, we can create more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. As Toby Hemenway demonstrates, creating an ecosystem in your backyard by bringing together plant communities that can work cooperatively and;

Improve and maintain soil fertility and structure,

Capture and conserve water within the landscape,

Provide habitat for beneficial insects, animals, and humans,

Create an edible "forest" that produces seasonal fruits, berries, and other foods,

is both an easy and satisfying endeavor.

This revised and updated edition also includes a new chapter on urban permaculture, specifically designed for people living in urban or suburban areas with very limited growing spaces. Regardless of the size of your garden or field, you can apply the basic principles of permaculture to make it more diverse, natural, productive, and beautiful.

“Permaculture Gardens is definitely the best permaculture book ever written, and a strong contender for the best gardening book ever written. Everyone should have it in their library.”

-Sharon Astyk-

Author of Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front

“Since they didn’t give us an instruction manual when we came into the world, it’s a great service when wise people write guides. Permaculture Gardens is one of the most important of these, and certainly a book we will need for the future world.”

-Bill McKibben -

Author of Deep Economy and Hope, Human and Wild

“Toby Hemenway’s Permaculture Gardens is a historic turning point for gardeners and landscapers, combining practice with vision, using the natural intelligence of Earth’s symbiotic communities to strengthen and sustain ecosystems where humans are a part, not a competitor. A magnificent work that shows us how we can and must live in harmony with nature!”

-Paul Stamets-

Author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

“Permaculture gardens are no longer dreams of the future. They are here and alive. Permaculture Gardens is an enlightening and must-read resource for anyone who wants to make their home garden healthy, sustainable, and healing.”

-Robert Kourik-

Author of Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape—Naturally

Be a sustainable producer, not a wasteful consumer. This magnificent book shows you how to do this by helping you create and develop wonderful backyard ecosystems. Apply the information in this book and begin to be an example that will positively change both your own community and beyond. Best of all, with this book, doing so is very easy, interesting, and fun.

-Brad Lancaster-

Author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond

There is so much wisdom in Permaculture Gardens that I would need to write a dozen columns to do it justice. A bold, impressive, nature-embracing, and entirely logical vision for the future.

-Justin Siskin-

Writer for Los Angeles Daily News

(From the Promotional Bulletin)