Permaculture Design Companion by Jasmine Dale is a very beautiful permaculture resource, in many ways. Based on Jasmine’s 20 years experience of teaching and mentoring over 1,000 permaculture students from her home at Llammas Ecovillage in Wales, her book is a brimming treasure chest of diverse permaculture design tools, process and principles.
Permaculture Design Companion itself is designed to be a workbook and literally a companion to guide and mentor us through a personal permaculture project. Although this is one of the main intentions of the book, I can already see how the individual sections as stand alone topics will be incredibly useful for many of us too. Jasmine’s written communication style is chatty and fun, while consistently demonstrating her obvious in-depth diverse knowledge and experience both as a permaculture designer and teacher.
The physical layout is something that I immediately connected to, with its relaxed font, and its many, many gorgeous diagrams, illustrations and spaces to make notes throughout.
The book is very much focused on using permaculture to design landbased/physical projects, but one of its many pluses is how it consistently weaves the connection of people involved to the physical space of the design. I particularly like the section about making sure that our wellbeing as the designer of the project is well supported and valued as being central to a successful design.
Permaculture Design Companion is aimed at both folk who are brand new to permaculture and also to more experienced practitioners, and I whole heartedly agree with this. Having quite a few years of permaculture design experience now myself, I continuously learnt about new ideas and approaches to the many aspects of permaculture design, as I read and engaged with the exercises.
This is yet another fantastic new book from Permanent Publications and like so much of their work, would make a wonderful present and life tool for ourselves and the people we connect with. I’m going to be starting a new garden design within the next few months and I’m really looking forward to testing out this fantastic new permaculture resource throughout the process.
Kt Shepherd is a permaculture educator, artist and no dig gardener. She also writes for Permaculture magazine.
