Hemenway's book was my introduction to ecological garden design. The most important take away from the book: You don't have to wait. Hemenway shows readers how to start designing an ecological garden, basically anywhere. It's easy to get into the *ahem* weeds of garden design, but he navigates these deftly. There are many examples of successful permaculture in unexpected places. You don't have to start with perfect soil and conditions. Good conditions are created by introducing plants and starting virtuous and interacting web of organisms. Contributions should be appropriate for a global audience. Please avoid using profanity or attempts to approximate profanity with creative spelling, in any language. Comments and media that include 'hate speech', discriminatory remarks, threats, sexually explicit remarks, violence, and the promotion of illegal activity are not permitted.

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. Returning to the pervasive symbolism of the day, it seems fitting that Climate in Colour’s first in-person event should have taken place in the Garden. Discussions about online activism and direct action in the form of demonstrations often focus on their impact on the external world. Platforms such as Climate in Colour are lauded for their capacity to instantaneously reach an audience at scale – yet, what is often lost in these discussions is that this mass outreach is atomised and individualistic. In an instant, a person can be plugged into a dizzying array of discussions, podcasts, reading lists, infographics, and online panels, but a post shared to a story or a comment left under a post is often the extent of communal engagement that social media platforms provide. Social media offers a platform for mass engagement, but for the individual that engagement is restricted by design to be isolated. Highlighting why community spaces are so important, the Garden provided a space wherein that individualistic engagement could be transformed into a collective engagement, a communal exchanging of reflections, perspectives, and connections, free from the expectation of turning a profit or maximising online engagement metrics. Gaia’s Garden is an ecological community in Auroville. Its tropical exotic plants spread over 2.67 acres. The little temple, the heart of garden, is surrounded by 9 ponds and plumeria. The banyan tree watches silently over the meditation garden. Statutes of gods secret themselves among the various lives. Opening your eyes to bird songs, following fireflies in the garden pavilion, melting thousands of stars to your heart on the rooftop terrace, you'll realize that you're in the arms of Mother Earth Gaia.

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Well, a new oneis opening this week right in the middle of thecity. Throughout the summerGaia's Garden, located by Holborn Viaduct, is going tohost daily cultural, arts and sustainability workshops for the local community. Photo: Francis Augusto Spilling over the walls – in contrast to the intimate gathering within – the clamouring, rancorous chants of an Animal Rebellion protest saw an outpouring of anger, hope, and desperation melded in a raging tide of outraged bodies. It was a very different physical manifestation of the desire for change. Nourishing discussions in community spaces and direct action on the streets; work undertaken on the self, and work undertaken out in the world; an online platform making its first debut in a physical space – the many faces of environmental action both tangible and intangible turned to look at one another, each distinct yet sharing the same body. The illusion of a fractured movement was, if only momentarily, shattered to pieces. After a year where many forms of community organising, engagement, and activism had been forced to move online, this colliding of actions-on-the-ground seemed draped in symbolism: now more than ever there is a clamouring for change, and physical spaces must play a front-and-centre role in making that happen.

Moving from theory toward practice, the second part of the book looks at the pieces of the ecological garden. A chapter each delves into soil (chapter 4), water (chapter 5), plants (chapter 6), and animals (chapter 7), but from a different perspective from that of most garden books. Instead of viewing soil, water, plants, and animals as static, as objects to be manipulated into doing what we want, I treat them as dynamic and constantly evolving, as having their own qualities that need to be understood to work with them successfully, and as intricately connected to all the other parts of the garden. What really makes this book pop are the last few chapters on guilds and food forests. Finally an approachable guide to directly replicating natural plant communities! Hemenway examines how to figure out what plant communities grow in the habitat where you live, and how to substitute related species with human uses for the usual, natural species found in that ecosystem. I love this because it is awesome. I also love this because it encourages the gardener to go out and understand local forests and maybe even learn to forage while also learning to cultivate the same ecological structures that local wildlife need for survival (wildlife here including bugs and birds), turning the home gardener from someone kind of reducing the overall burden on agricultural land (freeing some up for wildlife habitat, maybe) to someone actually creating a native habitat oasis where they get their food. Ah! I love it. Love it! Swear words, sexual references, hate speech, discriminatory remarks, threats, or references to violence The classic book about ecological gardening–whatever size your garden–with over 250,000 copies sold!Featuring a garden and views of garden, Gaia's Garden Guest House is a sustainable guest house located in Auroville, 1.7 km from Auroville Beach. The air-conditioned accommodation is 8.1 km from Sri Aurobindo Ashram. There is a sun terrace and guests can make use of free WiFi, free private parking and an an electric vehicle charging station. Permaculture is a verbal marriage of "permanent" and "agriculture." Australian Bill Mollison pioneered its development. Key features include:

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!”Primarily intended as a chillplace to hang outand relax, the garden also exists to teach visitors allaboutenvironmental causesthrough workshops, installations and performances. More than200 young Londonerswere involved in not just the building and gardening but also the curatingofGaia's live events programme. Photo: Francis Augusto But anyway, enough bitching about the movement and onto this book in particular. I did get a list of plants beyond comfrey that have deep taproots that I can use to chop and drop for mulch and that I can start from plants or seed I can get cheaply or already grow and can propagate to that end. The book needed more illustrations/plans of gardens to make his points, in my opinion. He relied too much on his own two properties for examples. It's sexist. It's sexist in its culture from what I've seen and read, and it's sexist that a lot of these ideas come from aboriginal women and from Westernized women like Ruth Stout and Esther Deans and that English woman of 100 years ago who I admit I'm forgetting the name of today. Seldom are those women referenced (One line in this book mentions Stout.) None of those women got rich off the core ideas. Nope. A bunch of men came along and capitalized on the ideas. You might counterargue, "Hey, that's just capitalism doing its thing. They stepped up to grab the available money and the women didn't." But these people allegedly hate capitalism, except, it seems, when they are charging for courses and consultations and raking in adsense money and "gofundme"ing their new greenhouses. TL;DR I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in designing and creating a permaculture or ecological garden of their own. 4/5 stars. And the wonderful thing about this is, that not only do we help with climate change, but we also create a sanctuary for wildlife. In a time when our insect populations in the UK have declined by over 60% in the last 20 years, this is vital for pollination, for the birds and bats, for the survival of the fragile web that sustains life on earth.