The Cultural Emergence Empowerment Deck is the latest creation by permaculture designer and teacher, Looby Macnamara. The deck contains  96 cards, and each one features one of Looby’s beautiful hand drawn illustrations. Although the deck is designed to be used in conjunction with Looby’s ‘Cultural Emergence - A Tool Kit For Transforming Ourselves & The World’ book, published by Permanent Publications in 2020, it's also a great ‘stand alone’ tool.

The deck features cards from the following areas of Looby’s work - The Cultural Emergence ‘phases’ (tools for balancing life), ‘practices’ (tools to embody regenerative habits) and ‘principles’ (tools to support effective decision making), the design framework from People & Permaculture, the Design Web and cards representing the 7 Ways To Think Differently, (growing supportive mindsets from systems of limitations). The last category the card deck includes is about the 8 Shields Model, designed by Jon Young, with the aim of deepening our understanding and practice of nature connection. 

It was really great to be part of a workshop Looby facilitated at the Permaculture Association’s ‘Festival Of Permaculture’, to explore how the cards could be used both personally and in group settings. Some of the ideas shared in the workshop that  fit with Looby’s intentions for the deck as a tool included - creative work, decision making, journaling prompts, problem solving, coaching, designing, and self care practices. 

I use card decks from a wide range of disciplines in both my personal and work life and I’m really looking forward to seeing how the Cultural Emergence Empowerment Deck can be used on a regular basis, especially as part of my permaculture design projects. 

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I’ve been really looking forward to reading this inspiring sounding new book from permaculture focused garden designer and educator, Anna Locke. And it hasn’t disappointed.

Anna has taken the concept of forest gardening and created a beautiful, engaging resource to teach and empower us to design perennial based foraging gardens where humans and non-human beings in nature can flourish. Her decades of knowledge and experience of connecting people with natural environment through garden design shines through every chapter of this very accessible book.

The Forager’s Garden takes us through a simple design process to grow ecological, wildlife abundant gardens. It’s a book about planting whole ecosystems on any scale, for community, private and guerrilla gardening projects. Anna’s work isn’t designed to compete with traditional vegetable and fruit growing but to compliment it. Yes, we could redesign whole gardens or community plots as foraging ones, but equally, creating small perennial plant spaces in gardens with annual edible or flower growing areas too, can also develop conditions for nature, (including humans), to thrive.

With clear, jargon free text, gorgeous illustrations, diagrams and photos alongside regular prompts for applying the information presented in each chapter to our own garden design, this book will suit gardening novices alongside those of us who like to learn and learn again especially from new authors and artists.

The Forager’s Garden leans to a focus on UK climate and includes chapters on; Defining what a foraging garden is; Designing for resilience and long term; How to plan your garden; Information for beginner gardeners; The benefits of including diversity in the different elements of garden creation; The use of trees in a forager’s garden; Embracing the use of plant guilds; The creation of ecological stability and abundance through creating multiple layers in a garden; Plant choices, Implementing and maintaining your garden design; How perennial focused foraging gardens or spaces in gardens, can be used in different spaces, for example, allotments, container gardening and gardening undercover or on windowsills. The book also contains an excellent “Plant finder” with lots of clear information about many common and some less so, plants that can be used to create a beautiful, successful garden space to forage from.

Anna skilfully weaves ecological principles throughout the abundance of knowledge, ideas and personal garden design experiences in her book. People with some prior understanding of permaculture will also recognise the permaculture ethics or values of Earth Care, Fair Shares and People Care at the core of The Forager’s Garden. The chapters skilfully link low budget, low maintenance, edible garden design to the bigger pictures around food security, wildlife habitat regeneration and community building

Though many of the garden design stories in The Forager’s Garden span over several years, Anna wrote this book against the backdrop of the last 18 months when both increasing public awareness and motivation about the urgent need to address climate change and the surge in numbers of people who started growing their own food for the first time as the COVID 19 pandemic became realities in our communities. It’s timely publication will be an important tool to use in individual household and community scale projects, as part of wide scale solutions focus for both of these global scale truths.

I wholeheartedly recommend The Forager’s Garden for us all.

The Forager’s Garden by Anna Locke is available from Permaculture Market

The beautiful, haunting lyrics and music of "I Killed the Bees" have been crafted in such a powerful way, that since its release last year, this track has been firmly stuck on a loop in my head. Tygermylk's vision is for their song to be part of the catalyst for regenerative planetary change.In my opinion, this track from the band's upcoming EP, is destined to become a core anthem in climate justice activism. 

A stunning version of "I Killed the Bees" is also available on Spotify 

This mini-review was originally written for the current  (No. 103 Spring 2020) edition of  Permaculture Magazine  

My Permaculture Illustrations on this new page on my site are offered free of financial cost, to use digitally in any regenerative change event or resource materials and marketing. Please just include a reference to my website with any use. 

Click here to learn more and access over 30 other free to use "everyday" Permaculture illustrations. I'll be adding more of my creative work to this resource over the coming months. To get reminders about this, sign up here to my monthly newsletter.

​Having followed the journey of Sarah Spencer’s course, workshops and training about using principles from nature, tress specifically, to navigate and thrive in our lives, I was really excited when I found out that she was also writing a book about the same topic. And I’ve not been disappointed. Think Like a Tree, the book, is a beautiful and incredibly informative tool for us all.
 
The 42 short chapters are brimming with examples of trees  from many parts of Earth, alongside every day case studies and ideas of how the nature principles taught to us by the presence of trees, can positively impact on our lives as individuals and within our communities. Each chapter covering one principle, are divided into 6 Groups – Observation, Purpose, Surroundings, Connection, Resilience, Future. There is a lot of information for each principle, as well as some really thought provoking exercises to undertake.  I really enjoyed reading about 1 principle each evening and I can recommend this approach in order to take time to absorb and reflect on the details presented.
 
Sarah’s work with Think Like a Tree has been very much linked to her life through living as well as possible with Chronic Illness. This theme is evident throughout  the book and means that Think Like a Tree could be particularly useful to others in similar situations.
 
Sarah claims that “Nature holds the secret to your happiness, health and wellbeing  - Think Like a Tree guides you to discover your own personal route to happiness, health, success and fulfilment – whatever your circumstances” – and I agree that this part ecology, part sociology, part history and part self coaching tool lends itself to being a useful and meaningful book for a diverse audience.
 
Think Like a Tree can be bought directly from Sarah at
https://www.thinklikeatree.co.uk/product/think-like-a-tree-book/

The Permaculture Design Companion by Jasmine Dale is a very beautiful new permaculture resource, in many ways. Based on Jasmine’s 20 years of experience of teaching and mentoring  over 1000 permaculture students from her home at Llammas Eco Village in Wales, her book is a brimming treasure chest of diverse permaculture design tools, process and principles.
 
The 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 of the Permaculture Design Companion is something that I immediately connected to with it’s A4 size, 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 land based/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.
 
The 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.
 
The Permaculture Design Companion 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 really looking forward to testing out this fantastic new permaculture resource throughout the process.

If you decide to buy this book then please consider buying directly from the Permaculture Market,  (where there is also loads of other fantastic permaculture related resources to inspire you!) 

This book review is also published in Permaculture Magazine Autumn 2019 (PM 101)

Strands of Infinity is a beautiful collection of poems from Permaculture Designer and teacher Looby Macnamara. (and one poem by her daughter Teya), written over recent years. Subtitled "Poetry to reconnect", this is exactly what this powerful writing does. Connecting the personal, political and spiritual we are encouraged  to explore how these intertwining threads manifest  in our own life  journeys. The poetry in this book is inspirationally written for both sharing at events and gatherings, alongside our own personal reflection.  With themes such as "Change the story", "Gratitude as Attitude," "This Woman is Rising" and "Will Humankind Survive", Looby's poems are wonderfully accessible on many levels to a diverse audience. I can strongly recommend Strands of Infinity  as a tool for our present and our futures

​I'm really excited to be illustrating this amazing online course being offered by the Permaculture Women's Guild. The course starts March 15th 2019 and folk will be able to start at their own pace anytime from that date.   Students are invited to :- 

For more details, including how to sign up, visit the Permaculture Women's Guild website, where you will also find lots more courses and opportunities on offer too.