Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
by Toby Hemenway, John Todd

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Book Reviews of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Book Review: A Snapshot of Permaculture
Summary: 5 Stars

The first book published in this country in a generation to embrace ecological design of the home landscape, Gaia's Garden is a snapshot of permaculture in America at the turn of the century. Toby Hemenway is a scientist, trained in genetics, who shares with his readers his rapturous enjoyment of the garden. Toby's pleasures are obviously enhanced by his knowledge of the intricate complexities of ecology; he offers this knowledge to the reader in a friendly and muscular style. A graceful foreword by John Todd, aquatic tinkerer and dean of American applied ecologists, gives us a glimpse of the world in a jar, prefiguring Toby's even richer world behind the garden wall, a world that with our help, can "pop" into life: buzzing, blooming, swirling, burgeoning across the landscape. In the mind's eye comes a vision of myriad ecological gardens popping to life all across America. If that vision should come into being, I hope this book will be remembered as one of its champions. Toby's language, particularly his naming of ecological functions in the vernacular, is often memorable: we cast our eyes over a terrain populated by "spike roots, fortress plants, mulchmakers, and shelterbelters." The soil chapter is especially well written, its prose brisk and metaphors well used. This is a better integration of soil ecology than I have read elsewhere, and though the information is by no means new, this version is engaging and helpfully succinct. The book offers an excellent contemporary and well-annotated bibliography, a good glossary of unique terms, and many extensive tables of useful species. I appreciated finding the tables and illustrations listed at the beginning of the text. The illustrations are attractive and clear, even in details, greatly enhancing the already solid text, and the photographic cover is beautiful, eye-catching and endlessly pleasing with its play of subtle colors and floral textures. This is a book you will use and re-use, and enjoy having around for a long time. Peter Bane, Black Mountain, NC.

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