[Scpg] [HD] SF Gate: A place where permaculture is preached -- and practiced

[Wesley Roe and Marjorie Lakin Erickson]

  Permaculture news from up north.
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This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SF Gate.
The original article can be found on SFGate.com here:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/12/01/HO58287.DTL
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Saturday, December 1, 2001 (SF Chronicle)
A place where permaculture is preached -- and practiced
Ron Sullivan


    When we arranged to meet Kate and Gene in Marin for a day of birding and
lunch, they sent us a map to the B&B where they were spending the weekend.
    Cricket Cottage in Point Reyes Station sounded, well, cute, as B&Bs
usually are, and was supposed to have an interesting garden. When we got
there, they greeted us with: "You've gotta see this place, right now!"
    They were right. Joe and I walked in to look and walked out plotting to
try it all at home, maybe even the ducks and chickens. Now that's
effective evangelism.
    What's being practiced and preached here is permaculture. I'd heard that
that was mostly observation and imitation of local ecosystems, plus
ingenuity. Garden and home are integrated with the natural neighborhood.
    Penny Livingston-Stark, a founder of the Permaculture Institute, confirmed
that impression as she led us around the koi pond to a little grape arbor
and bench. "It's hard to separate the garden from the structures - from
your water system, from your energy system . . ."
    The koi pond is part of the gray water treatment system, which works well
enough to keep the fish healthy and happy.
    The dirt dug from the pond didn't go far: It became the cob office
building, a hobbitish, dignified one-room structure just across the path.
Cob is a mix of clay, sand and straw, and looks like a rough-finish adobe.
That and the design and color of the building, with rounded edges and
terra-cotta colors, make it look like something that grew right out of the
garden.
    A step back elicits a double-take, as the rest of the hobbit cottage
reveals itself as a brick-red dragon coiled around the back, its head and
tail on one side forming an ingenious arrangement of bench and baking
oven.
    The dragon's mouth is the oven mouth, of course. A wood fire heats the
oven's cob walls and stone-slab floor and belches flame and smoke in fine
style. Then it's raked out to be replaced by pizza, breads and such in
traditional brick-oven succession.
    It occurs to me, as we're talking recipes, that the residual heat would
warm the office too. Turns out there's more to it than that. Office
windows - most of the front wall - face south, with just a bit of overhang
to the roof to keep the place from being a solar oven. The walls are thick
enough to absorb, retain and gently radiate heat for hours, and not only
to the inside of the building.
    James Stark, the institute's other founder, grins up at a pond-side tree:
"It's not only the individual elements, it's how you put them together. So
we have the pond in front of the office building.
    "Out here on the coastal zone, where we have fog and cool summers, having
peaches and nectarines is a bit of a problem. By having this kind of
siting, the peach tree right here where the sun bounces off the water, you
get more light on the tree, and more warmth. And the sun can come down on
the building and heat that mass; it alters the ecosystem around the front,
warms it.
    "It also alters the temperature right there in the winter, moderates it.
That's why we have our citrus right there, too."
    On our tour we've talked about energy-efficient landscaping - planting
deciduous trees on the south side of a house in a hot-summer area, for a
standard example. Here is a step beyond that, into a delightful,
pleasurable cleverness. There's more of it everywhere we look, and I'm
enjoying the way wonkery mates with sensuousness.
    Behind us is the living fence, a pleached and cordoned row of heirloom
pear trees enclosing the guesthouse garden. Stark talks about long-term
cost and upkeep, and the prospect of doing maintenance with pruning shears
instead of hammer, nails and paintbrush - and getting a nice pear crisp
for dessert. Tom Sawyer never had it so good.
    Two of the garden features I recognize from last spring's San Francisco
Garden Show: the willow chicken tractor and the Balinese bale, a
thatch-roofed bed-pavilion on elephantine bamboo feet. Both are as
graceful and inviting as the rest of the garden and have the same
just-grew look, although I know perfectly well the bale's materials are
exotic as peacocks.
    What actually looks exotic is another one-room house, an elfin-Gothic
bedroom built of straw bales and plastered in fuchsia and gold.
    All the buildings are part of the garden, and vice versa; even the private
guesthouse, which opens onto its own tiny garden. And the whole integrates
almost seamlessly into the natural world.
    It's full of wild birds; we see a little brush rabbit foraging by the
guesthouse; and Livingston-Stark swears that half the plants are
volunteers, bird- and critter-planted. That includes the feverfew, whose
white blossoms act as path lights, the crimson amaranth ripening all over,
three walnut trees in a neat row, the rhubarb I keep tripping over, the
tithonia, tomatillos, lemon balm, lamb's-quarters and purslane.
    Others, like the apple trees and the South American tuber nasturtiums came
from generous human friends, and Livingston-Stark offers us a handful of
tubers and a perennial kale start in the course of conversation.
    The economy of plenty that I've always loved among gardeners is an
extension of the generosity of nature. "You're having a working
relationship with a whole lot of other gardeners out there," she says,
waving at the crows and white-crowned sparrows all around.
    "What I'm most moved by: You give back so little and you get so much in
return. There's this incredible willingness from the planet itself, from
the land, to respond."
    That easy generosity follows on the sense of integration these gardeners
have with the world, which does after all give birth to us. It might be
why Kate and Gene looked so relaxed after getting, at least temporarily,
back to the garden.

TO LEARN MORE
    -- What's a chicken tractor? Call the Permaculture Institute of Northern
California, (415) 663-9090 or check www.permacultureinstitute.com, for
monthly tour and workshop schedules.
    -- To reserve at a stay at Cricket Cottage, call (415) 663-9139.
    - R.S.

    Ron Sullivan is associate editor of Terrain
(www.ecologycenter.org/terrain/terrain.html) and garden editor of the new
Faultline Magazine (www.faultline.org). She's a former pro gardener and
arborist.
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Copyright 2001 SF Chronicle

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