Toby Hemenway
Taking permaculture off the broadacre farm and into an ordinary back garden, at a scale most readers could actually attempt.
The record
- Standing
- foundational work
- Years
- died 2016
- Based
- not recorded
- Taught
- Adjunct professor at Portland State University; Scholar-in-Residence at Pacific University; taught more than sixty seventy-two-hour design courses.
- Recognition
- Nautilus Gold Medal, 2011, for Gaia’s Garden; named by the Washington Post one of the ten best gardening books of 2010.
Standing is this studio’s placement of the work, not a ranking of the person, and it is the one line here that is a judgement rather than a cited fact.
The work
Gaia’s Garden did something the founding texts did not: it answered the question a person with a suburban lot actually asks. It became the best-selling permaculture book in the world, and it is the book most North American practitioners were handed first.
His last book, The Permaculture City (2015), pushed the same argument further into town — arguing that the densest, most heavily built places are where the design logic has the most to work with, not the least.
He died in December 2016 of pancreatic cancer.
Where to read them
Sources for this record
Corrections
This record was assembled from the sources above, and nothing in it was inferred to fill a gap. If it is about you and it is wrong, or you would rather not be listed, write and it changes.