Growing Community in Southwest Michigan
In the interest of the public good, and because I’ve enjoyed listening to this interview several times, I’ve transcribed the dialogue from it below. Bill was slowing down and approaching the end of his days here (age 77 in this interview, he died in 2016 at 88). His speech was a bit slurred at...
Looking at pictures of the Permaculture gardens at Bealtaine Cottage, it seems completely impossible that such beauty and abundance could have come from 3 acres of north-facing, wet, rush-infested land, without the help of any chemicals or tilling. It’s even more remarkable that this garden of Eden was built almost entirely by one woman...
Bill Mollison is a name that should be familiar to most people who’ve had any exposure to Permaculture, as he is the co-originator of the term and practice (with David Holmgren), and probably its most widely-published author and widely-traveled teacher and promoter. He was 50 years old when the seminal Permaculture One was published...
Martin Crawford is a pioneer in temperate-climate forest gardening, taking up the work of Robert Hart but applying it at a larger scale, with better plant spacing and arrangement, an academic fastidiousness, and much larger number of species. He has been publishing the excellent Agroforestry News from the UK since 1992, and more recently...
Mark Shepard may be the first person in the U.S. to apply Permaculture at the scale of a 100+ acre farm, with tree crop polycultures as the primary focus. He took up the lessons of J. Russell Smith and put them into practice on a hilly, beat-up farm in SW Wisconsin in the mid-1990s....
