Ecological garden design is a holistic approach to creating abundant, low-maintenance gardens. An ecological garden is more than the sum of its parts. It becomes a living, breathing complex system, it does this by integrating a diversity of species into a coherent, interconnected whole. Recently, the movement towards sustainable gardening is gaining momentum, however, it still stems from a fragmented approach to garden design.
Conventional garden design prioritises style over function, and often fails to connect soil, water and plants into a cohesive pattern. These gardens look good but are high maintenance, labour-intensive and high-cost to set up. Even with growing public awareness about the need to nurture wildlife and preserve native species, conservation landscapes tend to exclude people, or limit their access.
However, people are also a living part of the landscape and instrumental in ensuring the continuity of re-wilding. Without access to natural environments where we can learn about ecological principles in action, it becomes harder to know how to work with these useful patterns in the garden. Many urban gardeners labour intensively to create green spaces and take on board trending gardening advice, they will introduce a corner for wildlife here, some flower beds at the front garden, a corner for a small-scale natural landscape there, and a vegetable patch tucked away at the bottom of the garden. This is often done unsystematically, resulting in disconnected elements that demand continuous maintenance work.
For instance, a corner for wildlife and a semi-wild landscape is laid out to exclude people and can attract undesired visitors to the vegetable growing patch. A vegetable garden does not offer much habitat to native insects and birds, it actively attempts to keep them out, where they become pests. The flower garden can attract pollinators but does not produce food or medicine and often is on display as far as possible from the vegetable garden.
With some forethought, gardeners can overcome these challenges by design. When gardeners work with ecological principles they learn to integrate many elements into a functioning, efficient ecosystem that can build soil, harvest water, provide habitats for wildlife and build high-yielding, supportive plant communities.
Now, the garden can emerge as a resilient, natural network, a place to cultivate a deeper knowledge about how nature works, learn to cooperate with life and appreciate how biodiversity generates abundance. Imagine the positive impact on the wider environment that interlinked urban ecological gardens can have in greening cities and educating people in the not-so-distant future. Humans through their actions have triggered a series of environmental crises but humans are also the solution to these crises, and nature is willing to cooperate...
This course was shaped by the ecological principles used in permaculture design, so the terms permaculture design and ecological design are often used interchangeably. The aim is to apply permaculture design to designing ecological gardens that work with nature rather than against it, fostering cooperation between all species instead of using toxic chemicals to eradicate plants or insects perceived as invasive or damaging.
In ecological gardens, we learn to use biological processes to keep the garden system in balance. We start by looking at what is permaculture design. It is not only about gardening, in fact, its main purpose is to pattern the structures people need to design to cultivate a harmonious relationship with the Earth and all living systems. It co-opts useful knowledge from a diversity of natural and social sciences.
As the course progresses we will focus on permaculture design specifically through the lens of practising ecological garden design, although the course also functions as an Introduction to Permaculture Design.