Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, Second Edition is one of the first books on permaculture I ever read and it is still one of my favorites.
I’m not the only one enthralled with this book. It was the best-selling permaculture book worldwide of its time and is still immensely popular today, thirteen years later.
Several articles on my website reference information in Gaia’s Garden, including posts on polyculture gardens, food forests, and fruit tree guild design.
The Author – Toby Hemenway
This gem was written by the late Toby Hemenway, a permaculture teacher, consultant, and lecturer based out of Portland State University.
The book Gaia’s Garden was first published in 2000 and then updated with a second edition in 2009. A few years later, Hemenway published another book, The Permaculture City, in 2015.
In late 2016 Hemenway passed away from complications from pancreatic cancer. With his passing, the world lost a brilliant leader in permaculture, but the legacy of his teachings lives on in his books.
Focus on Home-Scale Permaculture
The book’s focus is permaculture for North American yards that are one-quarter of an acre and smaller. However, Gaia’s Garden has relevance for any location around the world, particularly in temperate regions.
The second edition also includes a chapter on gardening in the city for those who live on much smaller properties with only small yards or no yards at all.
Organization
The three parts of Gaia’s Garden are:
- Part One: The Garden as Ecosystem
- Part Two: The Pieces of the Ecological Garden
- Part Three: Assembling the Ecological Garden.
Part One: The Garden as Ecosystem
Here Hemenway lays the foundation for the book by introducing the concept of gardens as ecosystems. He provides some practical tips for the ecological gardener and laying out the ecological garden design process.
This quote from the beginning of Gaia’s Garden beautifully describes the point of Part One, and really the purpose of the entire book.
Ecological gardens meld the best features of wildlife gardens, edible landscapes, and conventional flower and vegetable gardens, but they go beyond simply adding these styles together. They are more than the sum of their parts. An ecological garden feels like a living being, with a character and essence that is unique to each. These gardens are grounded in relatively new concepts such as permaculture and ecological design, but they use time-tested techniques honed to perfection by indigenous people, restoration ecologists, organic farmers, and cutting-edge landscape designers. They combine low environmental impact, low maintenance (once established), and high yields with elegant aesthetics. Gaia’s Garden provides tools to understand, design, and construct these backyard ecosystems so they will benefit people and the rest of nature as well.
Toby Hemenway, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, Second Edition, page 3
Part Two: The Pieces of the Ecological Garden
This part discusses the building blocks that make up an ecological garden, with a chapter each on soil, water, plants, and animals. Understanding these fundamental components is key to creating your own ecological garden. Hemenway’s explanation of each is both accessible and thorough.
Soil is the foundation of any garden, and this chapter talks not only about why soil is so important but how to build soil in your own garden, with explanations of techniques including cover-cropping and sheet mulching.
The same goes for the other chapters in Part Two, including water-wise techniques, plant selection, and the role of animals in the ecological garden.
Part Three: Assembling the Ecological Garden
As the title suggests, Part Three is about putting together the pieces discussed in Part Two. It’s not the individual components, but the relationships between them that make an ecological garden (or ecosystem) function. As Hemenway says, the whole is greater than the sum.
This section contains the pinnacle of the book. It begins with Chapter Eight, Creating Communities for the Garden, which discusses organic gardening techniques of companion planting and interplanting.
Hemenway takes the idea of plants supporting plants a step further in Chapter Nine, Designing Garden Guilds. This chapter discusses different approaches to plant guild design. It covers the many ecological functions and human uses of plants within a guild, from air purifiers to windbreaks and aromatics to wood production.
Finally, Hemenway gets to the ultimate ecological garden in Chapter Ten, Growing a Food Forest. This is the peak of the book. It’s what the preceding words build up to, and what the following words support.
The remaining chapters cover ecological gardening in a city and a summary chapter reviews the process of designing, growing, and evolution of the ecological garden.
Appendix
This is perhaps the most useful part of the book. It is tables with various plants and their uses in an ecological garden. I return to this table, along with the other tables scattered throughout the book, regularly when creating my own designs.
Strengths of the Book Gaia’s Garden
Overall I find Gaia’s Garden a source of both inspiration and useful information which I refer to time and again. The concepts Hemenway discusses aren’t new but are sorely missing in our modern urban life. Even avid organic gardeners have a lot to learn from this book.
The theory doesn’t bog down the reading. Hemenway includes just enough theory to provide context to his teachings but then goes further with practical methods to design and grow your own ecological garden.
Many images, tables, info blocks, and diagrams help convey information and break up big blocks of text.
The tables are useful resources to reference when planning an ecological garden, including plant lists, functions to include, and more. Many of the info blocks are instructional with steps for implementing projects, such as planning a water harvesting system and planting a polyculture garden.
Weaknesses of the Book Gaia’s Garden
One weakness I’ve found is in his attempt to make the book applicable to people who rent or live in apartments with little to no land to work themselves. He does provide some useful solutions for these situations in Chapter eleven. However, the book as a whole is better suited for those who have at least a small or moderate-sized urban lot of a tenth to a quarter of an acre on which they are free to plant and build.
Another criticism I’ve seen expressed about this book is its wordiness, although I don’t personally have a problem with it. I find the language beautiful and inspirational. I’ve underlined passages to come back to, and I skim sections that don’t speak to me as much. The structure and headings of each section make it relatively easy to sift through for the information I’m looking for.
Conclusion
To sum up, I would recommend Gaia’s Garden by Toby Hemenway to anyone new to permaculture who wants to begin their own permaculture garden.
It’s a great book to pick up and read bits and pieces of when you have a spare moment. Unlike many permaculture books that are heavy with theory, Gaia’s Garden provides many practical tools to help you get started creating a permaculture garden.
The tools Hemenway lays out for the urban dweller are becoming increasingly important in these uncertain times of climate change, pandemic, and fragile supply chain. So, I imagine this book will remain popular for years to come.
If you’re interested in purchasing Gaia’s Garden, consider getting it either directly through the publisher, Chelsea Green, or through Bookshop.org, an online network of independent bookstores. If you prefer Amazon, it’s available there as well. I am an affiliate of all three, so your purchase through any of the above links will generate a small commission for me at no extra cost to you. I appreciate your support.
Happy reading!
Leave a Reply