Are you looking for an inspiring vision of the future?

Look no further, it's already here.

Permaculture provides positive solutions for us all, to create environmentally sustainable, harmonious and abundant ways of living - and what's more it's exciting!

Here you will discover that you have a significant influence on the world around you and that you can make simple choices that will change your life for the better.

Here you will find both information about permaculture itself and to give you some ideas, the many ways in which I have incorporated its design principles into my own life. One common misconception is that permaculture is just about organic gardening, but we can use its principles to design anything from transport systems to housing and economics to community networks.

Learn Permaculture!

It was the single most important thing that I ever did in my life and here you will find out why I think so and learn more about what I can offer.

As a starting point though you might wish to watch one of my videos or maybe purchase a copy of my book, which evolved from perhaps the first fully online Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design portfolio (here since 2003 and now available as downloadable pdfs).

There are additional pages showing a few of the gardens I've designed, created and/or maintained in very different places, during that period using permaculture principles. You'll find a page dedicated to explaining permaculture and why we all need to be doing more of it and I've also included some recent articles that I've written for Permaculture Magazine.

The links page provides many more sources of inspiration and information if you wish to learn more. You can even enjoy photographs of some of my Salad Mandalas, created using plants from my own garden.

Take your learning to the next level... Perhaps you're here because you just read my book, in which case you might like to learn more about the different courses and design support events I offer, that will deepen your understanding of permaculture and teach you how to apply the design tools and methods to your own life. In the full design course we also explore permaculture in gardening and farming, looking at soil, water, trees and plants, along with its applications in natural building, energy, community, economics and much more. Additionally I offer tutoring to design course graduates who sign up the Permaculture Association's Diploma in Applied Permaculture Design. Contact me if you are interested.  Enjoy!

Permaculture is about working with nature to make a better world for us all. By studying patterns in the natural world, we can derive for ourselves, a set of guiding principles. Permaculture design uses these principles to develop integrated systems to provide for our needs of food, shelter, energy and community in ways that are healthy, efficient and sustainable. Using Permaculture design we can improve the quality and productivity of our individual lives, our society and our environment.

Permaculture also has an ethical basis:

• Earth care - enabling all life systems to continue and increase.

• People care - enabling access to the resources people need for a good quality of life.

• Fair share - voluntary limits to population and consumption; to share resources for Earth care and People care.

Permaculture is a way of designing systems, to maximise yields using the least effort. While it can be creatively used to design almost anything that we do, it is at present most commonly applied to food production. Our current farming systems are very energy-intensive, either through the use of heavy machinery, fossil fuels, chemicals or manual labour. Not only are these unsustainable in energy terms, but they are also rapidly degrading our soils and in turn the nutritional value of the food that we grow in them. While natural systems cycle back nearly one hundred important elements into the soil, NPK fertilisers put back three! The end result of such practices is plain to foresee. We need to re-evaluate the way we grow our food urgently! While the current trend back towards organic farming and gardening is a step in the right direction, any system of mono-culture (planting large areas with a single crop) will always be a struggle against nature's unstoppable tendency towards bio-diversity. Thus 'organic' in itself is still not the answer. We need truly sustainable systems and Permaculture can help us to design them.

So when we design food growing systems, we ask ourselves "How would nature do this? What kind of wild flora and fauna live here, and what adaptations have they made to become successful?" As I'm sure you've noticed, large areas of a single species are not commonly found in nature and while a mono-cultured grain field may look full, it occupies only one level in terms of height and depth.