Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

Gaia’s Garden is the best-selling permaculture book in the world. The enlarged, updated 2nd edition is the winner of the 2011 Nautilus Gold Medal Award.

The first edition of Gaia’s Garden sparked the imagination of America’s home gardeners, introducing permaculture’s central message: Working with nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of the permaculture approach for urban and suburban growers.

Due to Toby’s health, we’re no longer selling books directly on this site.
Please purchase from Amazon or another book seller.

Gaia’s Garden was named one of the top ten gardening books of 2009 by The Washington Post.

Selected Excerpts from Gaia’s Garden:

• Gaia’s Garden: Table of Contents
• How to Use Gaia’s Garden
• Introducing Gaia’s Garden
• The Gardener’s Feathered Friends
• The Three Sisters—or Is it Four?
• Using Natural Plant Communities to Guide Guild Design
• How To: The Ultimate, Bomb-Proof Sheet Mulch

Ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can be done on any scale. It’s fun and easy 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 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 new chapter on urban permaculture, designed for people in cities and suburbs with 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 work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

Here’s what reviewers are saying:

“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

“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

“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, publisher and 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.

“Takes the native plants and organic gardening movement to the next level.”

—Joel M. Lerner, The Washington Post

“A bold, wonderful, nature-embracing and completely sensible vision of the future.”

—Justin Siskin, Los Angeles Daily News

“Practical science for making your yard produce food and beauty.”

—Rose O’Donnell, The Seattle Times

“A gardener’s blueprint for ecological abundance from the ground up.”

—Steve Spreckel, Acres USA

“Outlines a revolutionary course for the future of gardening and agriculture.”

—Dr. John Todd, founder of The New Alchemy Institute.