Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
OK
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, 2nd Edition Paperback – April 1, 2009
Purchase options and add-ons
"Gaia's Garden will be recorded in history as a milestone for gardeners and landscapers. . . An amazing achievement."--Paul Stamets
The classic book about ecological gardening--whatever size your garden--with over 250,000 copies sold!
"A great book!"--Men's Journal
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.
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--even for the beginner--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
This revised and updated edition also features a 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.
- Print length313 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherChelsea Green Publishing
- Publication dateApril 1, 2009
- Dimensions8 x 1 x 10 inches
- ISBN-101603580298
- ISBN-13978-1603580298
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together
Similar items that may ship from close to you
From the Publisher
Customer Reviews |
— |
— |
— |
---|---|---|---|
Price | — | — | — |
Keyhole Garden Beds | A keyhole bed planted with cabbages, tomatoes, and pathside greens and herbs in a space 8 to 10 feet in diameter. | Several keyhole beds can extend from a central path to create a garden with pleasing curves and plenty of accessible bed space. | A mandala garden. A circular pattern of nested keyhole beds is both beautiful and space-conserving. |
A graywater wetland
|
|
|
---|---|---|
|
|
|
A forest garden for a rectangular yard
Editorial Reviews
Review
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
Review
"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.)
"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)
"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)
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.
Visit his web site at www.patternliteracy.com
Product details
- Publisher : Chelsea Green Publishing; 2nd edition (April 1, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 313 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1603580298
- ISBN-13 : 978-1603580298
- Item Weight : 1.7 pounds
- Dimensions : 8 x 1 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #9,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
Videos
Videos for this product
1:15
Click to play video
Practical Guide to Permaculture on a small scale
Deeanne Curtis
Videos for this product
0:14
Click to play video
Customer Review: Wet pages = lack ability to read
Teresa Brown
About the author
Toby Hemenway is the author of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, which for the past six years has been the world's best-selling book on permaculture, a design approach based on ecology for creating sustainable landscapes, homes, communities, and workplaces. He has been an adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Education at Portland State University, Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University, and a biologist consultant for the Biomimicry Guild. He teaches, consults, and lectures on permaculture and ecological design throughout the US and other countries. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Natural Home, Whole Earth Review, and American Gardener. He lives in Sebastopol, California, where he is developing sites and resources for urban and small-town sustainability.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
His book is a comprehensive gardening manual for suburbanites, but it is much more--it is a roadmap to a revolution. Not, of course, a revolution as it is normally imagined--storming the barricades and all that. But rather, a deeper, more fundamental revolution in the way we live and think, starting, quite literally, from the ground up. (His chapter on topsoil will fundamentally change the way you look at the stuff under your feet!)
Until this book came along, Permaculture was widely marginalized and stereotyped as a kind of quaint hippie agrarian movement, a vestige of the 70s, for folks who wanted to abandon modern industrial civilization to go back to the land, buy a few acres, and grow their own food. But Hemenway understood that this movement was not just about growing food, and not simply for hippie farmers, but a fundamental shift in orientation for our civilization with practical implications for everyone--including and especially city dwellers and suburbanites.
For those who simply seek detailed gardening advice, on what to plant, when, and where, this book has copious information, practical advice, and suggestions, along with tables and charts galore. But it is much, much more. It introduces us to Permaculture as a way of thinking, a way of understanding design as a regenerative process, and of understanding ourselves as a part of, rather than apart from, the natural world we inhabit.
Read it closely and carefully, and you will never be the same--you will transform not only your backyard, but also your understanding of life itself, and of your place in it. You will find yourself as part of a worldwide movement of quiet revolutionaries who are healing our planet one backyard at a time, and not only growing delicious, abundant food, but sowing the seeds of a regenerative future for all our children. Toby Hemenway has passed away--a great loss to our planet--but in this book, he has preserved and transmitted the essence of his practical knowledge and wisdom to all the rest of us. Read it, learn it, consult it, and then join the revolution, the healing process for our sick and dying planet, starting in your own back yard.