Today I had to say goodbye to a friend.
For the last few weeks, I’ve shared a part of almost every day with Gaia’s Garden – A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture. I took this book slowly, savouring the calm that came from flowery descriptions of my soon-to-be flowering home; relishing the excitement of new knowledge. Not only will the knowledge I gained in this book be helpful to me for the rest of my life, I also found it very fun and inspiring.
An example. In the first few chapters, my eyes were opened to the concept of ‘edge’ in nature. An ‘edge’ is where one type of bio-community changes into another one, like deep forest to meadow, or grassy field to stand of trees. There boundaries are rarely straight lines. Instead, the space between these communities is a bustling place in which members of both communities thrive and compete.
I’d never thought of it that way before! My adventure walks through the wild forests around our house changed from distant appreciation to hands-on learning, just like that.
Also, I never truly understood or appreciated DIRT. Dirt! People use it as a negative! But dirt is amazing! It’s alive! It’s a miracle!
(I have now used my quota of exclamation points. I am still excited, but will use less gregarious punctuation for the rest of this entry).
This book is a great introduction to the concepts of permaculture, and especially forest gardening. It’s written in an ornate way, and the author’s cheerful love of plants and nature comes through on every page. There are lots of examples of useful plants and how to grow them easily and ecologically.
This book was especially fun for me to read because the topic is so close to my heart. Recreating the forest of Eden?
Um, yeah. Let’s do it.
