The Constant Gardener

I was moved to write this brief piece after a solitary night viewing an old video of Bill Mollison the bearded Aussie who coined the phrase perma-culture (from permanent agriculture) to indicate a sustainable way of feeding ourselves and enjoying an abundant life without undue stress or harm to the land on which we live. The aspect of the video Global Gardener that inspired me the most was the way this man travelled, to parts of rural Africa, urban India, the Pacific North-West islands, Tasmania and the States (to name but a few of the places) and on arrival he taught people skills to adapt a sustainable way of living to suit their own particular environment and way of life. Here is the good bit though, this man returned to the places he had visited the next year, or within the next few years and the people that he had taught were up and running and were teaching the next generation! They had become a seed force sending new arrivals out to cultivate their own new area, like a veritable aussie apple-seed this man was planting a living tradition wherever he went in order that the life of that area was not dependent on him, or even those he taught in order to proliferate and grow. This surely is a way forward, an inspiration in a world of vast corporate farming conglomerates and mono cultures. This was a man who had tasted Eden back on his own ranch where he delighted in showing the camera how you could pick fresh fruits from countless varities growing wild and laze down for a snooze in the gardens close by the house (not even to be seen or disturbed) and who felt generous enough to share that potential. A man who could calmly clamber through the vast increasing deserts of the American South-West and illustrate very soberly how our greed, for water, for land reclamation was destroying the earth whilst quickly moving on to another place to do his little part in the counter flow to these dominating and disturbing trends. I was appalled at our ignorance, I was delighted by our potential when a real teacher comes.


The genius of Bill Mollison for me was that he taught the future teachers, that he gave to people in such a way that it empowered them to become carriers of the same wisdom to the extent as he openly admitted that many of his pupils now know more about the environmental needs of their own particular landscape than he ever would. Is this not the goal of psychotherapies, of spiritual teachings, the perennial wisdom? Not that the message should be displayed in shop windows as a kind of 21^st century window dressing for the existentially exhausted psyche…but that people take the time, the care (soren, in the formulation of Heidegger) to reach out and touch others so that this initially foreign other can unfold into their own potential so surely as to go on to touch others in equal measure. For Bill cared for the earth as true home, so those he taught cared also, for the true. The truth is a light, let us not worship gurus and institutions but instead this light that can guide us on our journey into the earth, the journey into ourselves. We need not sit and bow to the light house when it is the light itself that will guide our small ship home. The true teachers know that it is the light that guides and no edifice no matter how prominent or structurally immense can substitute for finding the compass and sextant inside. I thank all of those that helped me see the light inside myself, I thankyou Bill.

Mark Jones

IMAGE: Bill Mollison (2005), image lifted from Tagari.