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needed to weave together all the threads I’d been exploring with grounded practical tools for transformation. It was there too that I met my husband, Evan. We were both 24. Travelling from different cities to this permaculture hub, we threw ourselves into an experience I think we both knew would change us. And it did. The Permaculture Web of Connection My sense is that when you finally decide to do a permaculture course, you’re wide open, looking for new direction. You open the door to the permaculture world and find a web of people doing positive action everywhere. I remember feeling a rising smile inside, an immediate sense of belonging. Permaculture is a shared global language adaptable to wherever you are and whatever you have. For the next decade, Evan and I travelled as permaculture educators in over 20 countries. We slowed down enough to create our base in the ecovillage where we met and owner-built our home and surrounded it with a food forest we use as a classroom. We wanted to remain debt-free, so our house is a series of buildable, affordable modules. Our children have grown up here and become natural educators. Permaculture life is their normal. Our eldest, Maia Raymond, now leads the Permayouth which recently won a Youth in Permaculture Prize thanks to PM and the Abundant Earth Foundation. My livelihood is teaching permaculture teachers online with people from six continents. During COVID-19, I could stay local, but continued to connect globally – I love it. The online course also allows me to offer half of the places as full scholarships to those in the Global South and refugee settlements. Permaculture humanitarianism has become a huge part of my world since taking my children to East Africa to work with permaculture programs in children’s homes and women’s groups. Our permaculture education charity, Ethos Foundation, supports local permaculture teachers to widely offer free courses, particularly refugees involved in Permayouth. I talk often with permaculture friends about how we as elders in the movement can be more engaged [pr]activists too. May East, from Gaia Education, says we must step up to ‘take permaculture from being on the menu, to being on the table’. Teaching permaculture teachers and being a speaker is my way of amplifying permaculture, as well as creating podcasts, YouTubes and writing. I am so grateful to have found permaculture. It seeps into everything I do. I see in so many places that it really can be the ‘difference that makes a difference’, touching the hearts and minds of people everywhere, one garden at a time. I used to think it was too slow, not enough. But I realise now that change is not linear. Permaculture myceliates. Morag Gamble is a global leader of the permaculture movement for change. She is a writer and film-maker and writes the popular permaculture blog, Our Permaculture Life, also on YouTube under the same name. 6  | Morag and Amale in Ladaki village School garden project, Bali Morag Gamble and Mama Visolela from Namibia - Global Ecovillage Network Ambassadors Morag teaching a PDC in her garden www.permaculture.co.uk
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© Katherine Reekie www.katherinereekie.co.uk The Forager’s Garden Anna Locke introduces the Forager’s Garden, a place where gardeners, cooks and Nature converge The forager’s garden describes an overall approach to gardening that is gentle, slow, inclusive and ecological. It is a garden that is prized for its wilder productivity, where there is a dynamic relationship flowing from garden to kitchen, as cooks go outside to source their essential, interesting foods and flavours, found growing on their doorsteps. Foods that would have been foraged away from home in the past are intermingled with traditional orchard, herb, vegetable and wild gardens, all rolled into one. This garden is as much about cooking as it is gardening, waking up the cook and the gardener inside of us in equal measures. The forager’s garden shares a lifestyle shift, where we see our gardens as places that provide for us, like an outdoor larder that contributes in a qualitative way to our diets. Seasonal gluts are preserved and planting is designed to spread variety throughout the year. It is a useful place, an ongoing project, where food is steadily added, season upon season, and the ecosystem being created is woven with itself and you! Falling in Love with Plants My journey into the world of plants began with a herbal medicine degree, pouring over ancient medicinal herbals, modern scientific journals and our phytotherapy coursework. I was captivated, possibly slightly obsessed, but then motherhood at 25 radically altered my path and the degree was abandoned. I must have been pining for plants as a couple of years later I enrolled in a one-day-a-week, year-long RHS course in gardening at Capel Manor College. I had a beautiful commute to Gunnersbury Park on the overground, fascinated by wildflowers like rosebay willowherb and golden rod along the wayside and the very botanically interesting walk through the park. These first steps on my gardening journey explain why, when it comes to plants, I am drawn to their uses, their medicinal or nutritional value and now, with permaculture insights, as supports for other plants or garden species. Like many of you, when I create gardens, I’m in it for the lifestyle – lotions, potions, jams, pickles – and experimenting in both garden and kitchen is a way of life to be enjoyed. I am a massive fan of the forest garden system and I have developed loads of them, on many different scales, for over a decade. I have evolved a pattern to follow when creating these gardens, realising it takes only an average of issue 108  summer 2021 |  7

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needed to weave together all the threads I’d been exploring with grounded practical tools for transformation. It was there too that I met my husband, Evan. We were both 24. Travelling from different cities to this permaculture hub, we threw ourselves into an experience I think we both knew would change us. And it did.

The Permaculture Web of Connection My sense is that when you finally decide to do a permaculture course, you’re wide open, looking for new direction. You open the door to the permaculture world and find a web of people doing positive action everywhere. I remember feeling a rising smile inside, an immediate sense of belonging.

Permaculture is a shared global language adaptable to wherever you are and whatever you have. For the next decade, Evan and I travelled as permaculture educators in over 20 countries. We slowed down enough to create our base in the ecovillage where we met and owner-built our home and surrounded it with a food forest we use as a classroom. We wanted to remain debt-free, so our house is a series of buildable, affordable modules.

Our children have grown up here and become natural educators. Permaculture life is their normal. Our eldest, Maia Raymond, now leads the Permayouth which recently won a Youth in Permaculture Prize thanks to PM and the Abundant Earth Foundation.

My livelihood is teaching permaculture teachers online with people from six continents. During COVID-19, I could stay local, but continued to connect globally – I love it. The online course also allows me to offer half of the places as full scholarships to those in the Global South and refugee settlements.

Permaculture humanitarianism has become a huge part of my world since taking my children to East Africa to work with permaculture programs in children’s homes and women’s groups. Our permaculture education charity, Ethos Foundation, supports local permaculture teachers to widely offer free courses, particularly refugees involved in Permayouth.

I talk often with permaculture friends about how we as elders in the movement can be more engaged [pr]activists too. May East, from Gaia Education, says we must step up to ‘take permaculture from being on the menu, to being on the table’. Teaching permaculture teachers and being a speaker is my way of amplifying permaculture, as well as creating podcasts, YouTubes and writing.

I am so grateful to have found permaculture. It seeps into everything I do. I see in so many places that it really can be the ‘difference that makes a difference’, touching the hearts and minds of people everywhere, one garden at a time. I used to think it was too slow, not enough. But I realise now that change is not linear. Permaculture myceliates.

Morag Gamble is a global leader of the permaculture movement for change. She is a writer and film-maker and writes the popular permaculture blog, Our Permaculture Life, also on YouTube under the same name.

6  |

Morag and Amale in Ladaki village

School garden project, Bali

Morag Gamble and Mama Visolela from Namibia - Global Ecovillage

Network Ambassadors

Morag teaching a PDC in her garden www.permaculture.co.uk

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