Permaculture: ethical gardening for a better future

David Bowie. Prince. Muhammed Ali. Harper Lee. Gene Wilder. Umberto Eco . . . Just some of the famous names on the gloomy roll-call of those who died in 2016.

Another is Bill Mollison, the Australian scientist, biologist, author, teacher and pioneering environmentalist known as the father of the global permaculture movement. It was in Mollison's groundbreaking book, Permaculture One, published in 1978 and which he wrote with his former student David Holmgren, that the concept of permaculture was first proposed.

Permaculture – which combines the words permanent and agriculture – is, explained the book’s authors, “a word we have coined for an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man. It is, in essence, a complete agricultural system.” Over the ensuing decades, however, the term took on a far wider meaning than originally envisioned by Mollison and Holmgren, so that today it’s come to mean an integrated, ethical approach to designing healthy, productive, sustainable, planet-friendly systems where humankind works with nature rather than against it.

How to do it

What does this mean in practical gardening terms? Broadly speaking, it means taking a holistic and ecologically friendly approach, one that fosters soil, plant, animal and human health as well as biodiversity and garden wildlife by taking nature as its role model.

More specifically, it means integrating a wide variety of simple techniques into your gardening year. These include making your own compost; recycling widely available “waste” materials, such as cardboard to use as a weed-suppressing, water-conserving mulch: adopting a “little-dig” approach such as that used by organic gardener Charles Dowding; using green manures to prevent soil erosion and promote soil resilience; growing colonies of plants that enjoy similar habitats and which are naturally suited to your garden’s growing conditions; leaving corners of the garden/allotment undisturbed to provide valuable habitats for wildlife; making a garden pond (even a tiny one); harvesting rainwater; saving seed; planting more trees to counteract air pollution; growing some of your own food and cut-flowers to minimise the damaging consequences of global methods of production; avoiding environmentally damaging chemicals; even growing a little of your own heating fuel in the form of firewood . . .

Permaculture in Ireland

One of the best-known Irish examples of a large-scale permaculture project is at Cloughjordan Eco Village in Tipperary, where the principles of permaculture design have been applied to everything from its eco-buildings to its community woodlands and farm. The village also hosts accredited courses on permaculture design, which are run in association with Cultivate and taught by some of Cloughjordan’s resident permaculture experts (cultivate.ie and thevillage.ie).