🌱 What is Permaculture?

Permaculture is the art of combining plants so that they strengthen each other — like in a natural forest. Instead of single rows of monoculture you work with small plant communities, in which each plant fulfils a function.

Inspired by Sepp Holzer (Tyrol, permaculture pioneer), Bill Mollison (Tasmania, inventor of the term "Permaculture"), and Toby Hemenway (USA, "Gaia's Garden").

The term goes back to Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, who coined it in the 1970s from "permanent agriculture". It describes a way of growing that does not start from scratch every year but builds a system that increasingly carries itself: perennials instead of annual replanting, covered soil instead of bare ground, closed cycles instead of bought-in inputs.

For a medicinal plant database this is more than a footnote. A large share of the classic medicinal herbs are perennial or self-seeding — lemon balm, comfrey, yarrow, lady’s mantle, sage. They fit into edges, beneath fruit trees and along bed borders where annual vegetables do not work, and keep yielding there for years with little attention.

The overview below sorts the plants in this database by their function in the system: nitrogen fixers, ground cover, bee forage, mulch producers, pest deterrents. One plant can take on several roles at once — which is exactly what the design aims at.