Herbal Healing for the Land: Permaculture and the Herb Garden
By Clea Danaan
Herbs are plants that contain strong oils producing distinct smells and containing constituents that have certain properties used for healing. We usually think of using these properties in healing through teas, essential oils, and tinctures. Herbs can also be invited to contribute their healing properties as whole plants, not just to the gardener, but to the garden. Thinking of how plants contribute to the garden itself is a way to develop a conscious relationship with plants that benefits you while also offering a little healing energy to the land.
A school of design called permaculture can offer us tools for thinking about this conscious relationship with plants. Permaculture comes from the words permanent and agriculture. It is a farming, gardening, and architectural design discipline that draws on the laws of ecology to inform its choices. Permaculturists seek to design and execute living environments that interact in sustainable and complex ways that are larger than the sum of their parts. Permaculture goes beyond organic, for it is not just about inputs and outputs as a traditional garden or farm is, but is about dynamic relationships occurring across multiple planes of space and through time. The philosophy goes beyond growing plants and includes the animals, people, and activities that interact with a space as well.
A permaculture system includes plants that offer multiple uses, such as food and healing, or food and nutrient accumulation (more on this later). It also calls for plants to fit different niches in an ecosystem, growing at different heights, for instance, and in different capacities throughout the whole system. Herbs are one kind of plant that can, therefore, be used in many ways in a permaculture design, because they each have many uses and can be grown in different ways.
Multiple Purposes
In traditional gardening, farming, or landscaping we tend to grow a plant for a single use. We grow tomatoes, carrots, or peaches so we can eat them. We plant grass to walk on. We cultivate roses for their attractive smell and also for their beauty. Even when a plant is grown for two reasons, such as roses, usually they are grown as single specimens with little thought to other plants around them. Plants are grown, in other words, to please people. In permaculture, we consider that the garden is a community of plants, bacteria, animals, and more, including but not limited to people. For this reason we choose plants that have multiple purposes, which might include:
• Beauty
• Food for people
• Food for animals
• Flowers for bees
• Shade
• A wind break
• A nitrogen fixer
• A nutrient accumulator
• A ground cover that holds in moisture
• Medicine
• A barrier to deer
Every plant offers at least two purposes, and in permaculture we take advantage of as many uses as possible. For instance, you might grow comfrey (a big player in permaculture) for its medicinal properties, which include healing gastric ulcers, bronchitis, and external wounds, among other things; as a pretty purple flower that blooms for much of the summer, which bees like, at about two or three feet tall in the middle of a garden bed; and as a nutrient accumulator, which means that the deep roots pull up minerals and nutrients from the soil, depositing them on the surface of the soil as the leaves fall off or die back in winter.
Greater Than the Sum of These Parts
By designing the landscape with multiple uses in mind, we create an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts. Nutrient accumulators, like comfrey, help rebuild soil after it is depleted by other plants. By planting it near heavy feeders, like tomatoes, for instance, we create a relationship among plants that aren’t just plants growing on their own for a single purpose. By planting relationships instead of single plants, we create a garden, its parts, and what might be thought of as the harmonics of those parts. In music, a harmonic is an overtone or section of a musical wave that fits within the base tone. When you hit a guitar string, for instance, you can hear the base tone, and often you can also hear a higher frequency tone that is the harmonic of that base tone. In a garden, when you create harmonics by resonating different plants purposes, you get the results (food, beauty, nutrients) and the harmonic of those results. You get complex relationships that are more than just the two energies you put into the system. You get that “hum” that you hear over the tones of a guitar. In a garden you can’t always name this harmonic, but you can see it in the results. The synergy among plants grown for multiple purposes creates further new relationships.
Herbs in the Permaculture Garden
Herbs are big players in the permaculture garden because they intrinsically offer so many uses: beauty, medicine, bug repellent, nutrient accumulators, etc. Therefore, by using herbs throughout the garden you invite dynamic relationships to occur. Before planting them randomly, however, consider their gifts and properties. To determine where in the garden to plant a certain herb, consider first what its growing needs are. Full sun? Dappled shade? Light fluffy soil? A little bit of alkalinity? You can figure this out by reading seed packs or plant tags, or by looking them up online or in a plant book. Many herbs grown for culinary purposes prefer full sun, slight acidity, and a loose soil. This can be obtained by mixing gravel, crushed granite, or even a little sand into your soil and adding compost. Then you need a sunny spot—at the front of a hedge, on a southern facing hill, or along the side of the house where heat accumulates.
Other herbs can handle a little shade. These include chamomile, arugula, basil, chives, mint, and parsley, to name a few. These can be nestled in your dynamic garden of relationship under other plants. In permaculture we talk about a plant guild, or planting of different species that interrelate and benefit each other. If your guild is built around a taller food producing tree, like an apple or nut tree, this is a place to utilize the herbs that can handle shade. They will, in turn, repel insects (garlic and chives are good examples) and deter grass, which steals water and nutrients from the tree.
Seamlessly we move from how the plant prefers to be grown to what it can offer. This is the beauty of permaculture: that by listening to the needs and wisdom of the plant we create dynamic harmonies in the garden.
Structural Ideas
Someone who really likes herbs can draw on two interesting permaculture design ideas in addition to the plant guild. The first is the herb spiral, and the second is the keyhole bed.
Herb spirals utilize not only horizontal planting space, but also vertical. The spiral is planted with the center at the highest point, then spiraling downward toward the ground. The spiral is maintained by creating solid walls out of bricks, stones, or wood. It is a simple spiral with only one lower level so that you can still reach the top of the spiral to harvest herbs easily. This design creates multiple niches in a small space. The top of the spiral is dryer and the bottom more wet. The southern exposure is hotter, and on the north side you get some shade (in the Northern Hemisphere). Near the top of your spiral, plant sun-loving plants like lavender, thyme, and rosemary (a creeping rosemary can also drape nicely over the edge). Sage, basil, and cilantro go in the middle, for they prefer more moisture. Mints and parsley, thirsty herbs that can handle a little shade, go near the bottom. On the shady side you might nestle in some moss or shady flowers, or plant cool-season vegetables like lettuces.
Keyhole beds are a raised, round garden plot with a hole in the middle and a little path leading to the hole. In other words, you have a way to enter the round bed along the path and stand in the “hole” part of the keyhole to harvest veggies and herbs. In this way you not only create beds with pleasant, curved lines, but you increase the surface area you can grow in while still being able to reach the plants from all sides. Usually this bed is used to grow food, but as we discussed earlier, in the permaculture garden we seek dynamic relationships. In the veggie bed we include herbs. Many herbs repel insects while providing beauty, food, and medicine. They benefit the dynamic vegetable garden.
When you delve into the dynamic relationships to be cultivated in a permaculture garden you learn even more what many plant enthusiasts already know: that plants are powerful beings with many gifts to offer. By listening to these gifts and planting a garden of relationships, we cultivate an even more powerful purpose; what might be considered the highest harmonic of the garden. We contribute to the healing of the land itself by inviting the powerful exchanges among complex relationships. The garden serves us. It serves the plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi that grow there. And finally it serves the earth, a vast permaculture garden itself that thrives on complex dynamics of interrelated exchange. Gardening becomes more than a hobby or a way to grow food. It becomes a powerful act of healing for the earth itself.
Clea Danaan writes and gardens from eastern Colorado where she grows plants, chickens, and a couple of homeschooled children. She has a background in outdoor education, energy healing, and massage. She is the author of Sacred Land: Intuitive Gardening for Personal, Political, & Environmental Change (Llewellyn, 2007), Voices of the Earth: The Path of Green Spirituality (Llewellyn, 2009), The Way of the Hen: Zen and the Art of Raising Chickens (Lyons, 2011), and Living Earth Devotional: 365 Green Practices for Sacred Connection (Llewellyn, 2013). Visit her at CleaDanaan.com.