Product Description

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.

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 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 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 new 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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2732 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781603580298
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"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)

“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



"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)

"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



“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)

“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's Gaia's Garden will be recorded in history as a milestone for gardeners and landscapers--a fusion of the practical and the visionary--using the natural intelligence of Earth's symbiotic communities to strengthen and sustain ecosystems in which humans are a partner, not a competitor. An amazing achievement showing 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 a thing of the future. They are here to stay and flourish. Gaia’s Garden is enlightening and required reading for all people who desire to make their home's landscape healthy, sustainable, and healing.”--Robert Kourik, author of Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape—Naturally

“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.”--Sharon Astyk, author of Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front

About the Author
Toby Hemenway is the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, and an adjunct assistant professor at Portland State University. He wrote the foreword for Heather C. Flores' Food Not Lawns.

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 including 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. His current project is developing urban sustainability resources in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. He teaches permaculture and consults and lectures on ecological design throughout the country. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. He is available for workshops, lectures, and consulting in ecological design.

Visit his web site at http:// www.patternliteracy.com

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Customer Reviews

Create a Sustainable Garden Using Less Input and More Diversity for Better Yields.
This book is a wealth of information. It teaches how to design and grow a home garden using permaculture and ecological gardening techniques. These techniques are designed to minimize input regarding fertilizers, pesticides and time, by imitating nature. Nature shows us that many different species of plants perform better together than one species. In permaculture each plant has more than one purpose. Not only will the plant provide food, but it may also shade another plant or attract beneficial insects. In Gaia's Garden you'll learn how to implement these ideas to create your own sustainable food forest.

Great Introduction
In my opinion, this is the best introduction to permaculture. It is very well written in a style that is easy to read and understand. There are, also, many color photographs and illustrations throughout the work. The author makes a point to direct the reader to the bibliography for further study of any subject covered throughout. Thank you Toby!

Lots of info with tables, glorious tables!
What I really love about this book is how much Mr. Hemenway goes into the *reasons* that these methods work. Call me obsessive, but I like authors to provide a good reason their techniques work and not just say "OMG, look at this harvest, just do exactly what I do!" Mr. Hememway gives us beautiful, well-though out tables of different nutrients certain plants accumulate, what kinds of bugs they attract, plants that can tolerate drought or provide mulch on the spot, plants that have "spiky" roots that break up tough top-soil and plants that can provide structure or shade to other plants. It's about using the attributes of different vegetation to do the work for you in a way that doesn't adversely impact the land. Armed with this information, you can create your own "guilds" and areas of companion plants that work best for your location. Outside of a textbook, this is the most complete information on gardening I have ever come across. The author even presents the downsides of the methods in, what I feel, is a very even-handed manner. No one style fits every need and Mr. Hemenway addresses that. This is my favorite gardening book, period.