What is your book about? I wanted to create a book about permaculture that anyone can pick up and understand, even if they’ve never grown something before. A lot of answers to almost any problem in the garden come back to one thing: working with nature by embracing it.
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Permaculture has been around for a while, but it kind of got hijacked by hippies. I’m coming from logical, even critical thinking. People have also tried to over-complicate it. Ultimately, it is nature-inspired design. You’re creating gardens or beds that are inspired by patterns in nature.
If you look at a forest, there are different layers. So if you’re planting an orchard, instead of just having the apple trees, look at what to plant underneath it.
Every garden is different and every garden has its own challenges – but also so many opportunities
Permaculture isn’t a simple solution. You have to use your brain, it’s not about just telling people what to do. Things like companion planting, or crop rotation, for example, the guides are often contradictory, and crop rotation is just another form of dynamic monoculture.
In nature, so many different things grow together. The truth of growing should be very simple, and if it isn’t, I think you’re doing it wrong. Plants want to grow. All you need to do is to try to encourage the right environment: focus on the soil and plant at the right time. And then it will do its own thing.
The Permaculture Garden: A Practical Approach to Year-Round Harvests by Huw Richards, DK, £25
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Do you think permaculture can make us better gardeners? Every garden is different and every garden has its own challenges – but also so many opportunities. And if you can understand your garden, then you can make it work hard for you.
Bill Mollison, one of the co-creators of permaculture, once said: ‘The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited, or limited only by the information and imagination of the designer’. I love that so much, because it’s about making the garden yours. I’m not here to police different gardening methods. I’m trying to bring back the idea that gardening can be fun and free and open. It’s good to experiment.
Grow the things that you love. If you’re not that partial to a turnip, it doesn’t need to be in the garden
I’ve got this beautiful rambling rose that I noticed was covered in aphids. Three weeks later, the aphids were all dead and I had the most stunning display. But I didn’t spray, I just left it alone. It’s one of the entry principles of permaculture: observe and interact, if you need to. But sometimes nature just needs a couple of weeks to rebalance.
What did you learn from writing the book? When I went to visit [natural farmer] Joshua Sparkes last year, he showed me all these different edible tree leaves, like mulberry and small leaf lime. It showed me that you can grow something for a salad on a tree if you want to. I rang up my editors and said we had to squeeze it in, and we did.
What’s the one piece of advice you’d share from the book? Grow the things that you love. If you’re not that partial to a turnip, it doesn’t need to be in the garden. It’s a simple message that people often forget.
I’ll read anything about… Regenerative agriculture – it almost comes under the permaculture umbrella, but looks at a bigger scale. How do we feed cities and communities? How do we create diverse landscapes?
What first sparked your interest in gardening? It was my dad. When I was three he got me involved in the vegetable garden and I was just amazed you could sow a tiny seed and you could get beetroot and peppers.
What’s your biggest gardening mistake? I have a terrible habit of believing I’ll just remember what I’ve planted, only to forget. I don’t use plant labels.
What else are you up to at the moment? I am doing a lot of permaculture and agroforestry plantings because I’m about to launch a plant nursery that specialises in selling plants for resilient landscapes. Although it’s not open to the public, we will be doing open days and we’ll be selling online soon.
Out now: The Permaculture Garden: A Practical Approach to Year-Round Harvests by Huw Richards, DK, £25
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