Permaculture is more than a gardening method. It is a design philosophy that can be applied to everything from backyards to whole communities. Here is what you need to know.
The word permaculture was coined by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s. It combines ‘permanent’ with ‘agriculture’ and later ‘culture’, capturing the idea of designing human systems that can endure indefinitely by working with natural processes rather than against them.
Permaculture rests on three core ethics: care for the earth, care for people, and fair share (distributing surplus to support the first two). These ethics underpin twelve design principles that guide everything from where you plant a vegetable bed to how you structure a community.
Some of the most foundational principles include observing and interacting (take time to understand a system before intervening), catching and storing energy (make the most of every resource, from rain to sunlight), producing no waste (every output from one element becomes an input for another), and designing from patterns to details (start with the big picture before working on specifics).
In practical terms, permaculture design might mean positioning a herb garden close to the kitchen, placing a water tank to catch roof runoff before it is needed, designing pathways to follow the routes people naturally want to walk, or choosing plant species that fulfil multiple functions at once, providing food, shade, and habitat simultaneously.
At the scale of an ecovillage, permaculture design shapes how the whole community interacts with its land. Roads and paths, buildings and gardens, water systems and energy infrastructure, all of these are positioned and designed to work together rather than in isolation.
For Afterlee, permaculture is not just a gardening method; it is the underlying logic of how the whole place is being designed. The goal is a landscape where every element supports every other, creating a system that becomes more productive and resilient over time.