Today’s Theme: Permaculture Principles in Landscape Architecture

Design living, resilient places where ecology and community thrive together. This edition explores how permaculture principles translate into landscape architecture at every scale—from pocket parks to campuses and city corridors. Join the conversation, share your ideas, and subscribe for field-tested patterns and stories.

Ethics at the Heart of Design

Protecting soils, restoring habitat corridors, and using native plant communities are not aesthetic afterthoughts; they are the engine of resilience. In one campus retrofit, prioritizing soil decompaction and leaf-litter mulching cut irrigation needs dramatically within a season. Share your favorite soil-first strategies below.

Ethics at the Heart of Design

Shade, comfort, safety, and belonging are design outputs. A plaza lined with fruit-bearing understory and seating beneath deciduous canopies invites lingering, conversation, and curiosity. When people feel cared for, stewardship follows. What simple amenity would most welcome your community into a greener routine?

Ethics at the Heart of Design

Fair Share means designing systems that cycle surplus—mulch, seeds, knowledge—back into the commons. Think tool libraries, community compost hubs, and seed-saving kiosks embedded into park plans. If your project produced a monthly surplus, who would receive it first, and how would you keep that loop open?

Reading the Site: Zones, Sectors, and Patterns

A week of dawn-to-dusk notes often reveals more than a month of modeling. Track puddles after rain, informal paths, and where people pause. In one library garden, noticing a midday breeze informed a cooling allee that became a beloved reading nook.

Reading the Site: Zones, Sectors, and Patterns

Map seasonal sun angles, reflective heat from facades, winter winds, and stormwater entry points. These sectors explain why edible shrubs flourish on one edge and fail on another. Share a photo of your annotated plan and we will highlight smart sector-thinking in our next post.

Harvesting Water, Slowing Flow

Contour-aligned swales hold runoff long enough for infiltration, turning flash floods into quiet percolation. Pair them with rain gardens planted in layered guilds for oxygen, filtration, and seasonal bloom. What plant mix would you choose for a north-facing, clay-heavy site?

Harvesting Water, Slowing Flow

Subtle grade shifts spread water laterally, preventing erosive channels and nourishing dry ridges. On a schoolyard retrofit, micro-berms fed a learning meadow that greened two weeks earlier each spring. Sketch three contour tweaks you could test on a small pilot zone.

Guilds, Polycultures, and Biodiversity

Imagine a plaza rim planted as a low food forest: canopy shade trees, mid-layer fruiting shrubs, herbaceous pollinator bands, and living mulch. The outcome is cooler microclimates and edible moments that invite citizens to harvest respectfully. Where could your city host such a edge?

Guilds, Polycultures, and Biodiversity

Stagger bloom times, place nectar plants within glide distance, and avoid pesticide drift near nesting sites. In a riverside promenade, a continuous ribbon of natives boosted butterfly counts after two seasons. Add your city’s top three pollinators to our community list.

Circular Materials and Soil Regeneration

Leaf litter becomes mulch; pruned branches become biochar; kitchen scraps feed a hot pile that warms a greenhouse wall. Post a photo of your compost system and share your favorite ratio trick for fast, sweet-smelling decomposition.

Circular Materials and Soil Regeneration

Select stone fines for permeable paths, reclaimed brick for edging, and untreated hardwood where contact with soil is planned. The patina tells a stewardship story instead of shedding microplastics. Which material swap most improved the feel and performance of your site?

Participatory Design Walks

Host seasonal walks where neighbors annotate maps with stories: puddles after storms, favorite sitting spots, and paths of children at play. These insights redirect effort to where it matters. Invite your community and tell us what you learned.

Citizen Science for Everyday Resilience

Simple tools—rain gauges, phenology calendars, temperature loggers—turn parks into living laboratories. Volunteers love seeing their data shape planting plans and maintenance. Comment with one metric you would track to guide next year’s improvements.

Seasonal Care Calendars that Empower

Publish a clear, shared calendar for pruning, mulching, seed swaps, and soil checks. Light, frequent actions prevent heavy, disruptive interventions later. Subscribe to download our editable template and adapt it to your climate zone.