The cover picture depicts the author's gardens in Ireland: a herb spiral with Power Tower
and Frog Pond beside a boggy meadow covered in wildflowers such as the Meadowsweet at the top.
Permaculture is the ethical design of sustainable culture and it's mostly associated with eco-smart food gardening. For the past 22 years author Alanna Moore has been a keen permaculture practitioner and promoter, while for 26 years she has also worked as a geomancer, assessing and balancing the subtle energies of places. Through combining her two fields of expertise she has discovered that implementing a geomantic permaculture design for sustainable food production and living helps to alleviate environmental problems on many levels, as well as the negativity and unsustainability of today's society. In this book she describes how to undertake a sensitive analysis of land capability in order to co-creatively develop a harmonious permaculture plan.
Alanna has been dividing her time between Australia and Ireland, both places where knowledge of geomancy the Earth's subtle, energetic dimensions - has survived relatively well, in understated undercurrents at the least. The Australian Aborigines and native Irish are highly intuitive peoples. Like other animist societies, the Irish believed that fairy beings help to care for their crops and livestock and that the 'Good People' must always be thanked, and their homes and pathways respected.
Nature spirits continue to be a dynamic force in the landscape, Alanna has discovered in her life of professional dowsing experience, travel and international teaching. By pendulum dowsing and meditative attunement she finds exactly where these beings are stationed and can thus avoid disturbing them. In this book she explains how eliciting nature's help in the garden and co-operating with the resident fairies can foster harmonious feng shui and the growth of giant juicy vegetables, as well as nourish our own inner, spiritual gardens.
"Sensitive Permaculture focuses on an energetic, loving approach to sustainable land planning, " says Alanna, who has three permaculture diplomas, "and when we connect to the sacred dimensions of life our activities become positively life-affirming and joyful."
The following themes are explored, as in the table of contents:
The sacred landscape Diminuation of 'resources' Living traditions Animism
Final frontiers Permaculture design Eco-spiritual approach
Slow cooking Slow down Living slow Still mind Slow get around
Sustaining our dreams Sustaining Earth's Dreaming
Colonisation Unwelcoming lands Learning to listen
Path of Least Effort Ethics of site selection Recovering landscapes
Patterns of influence State of the soil Soil dowsing Soil aeration and initial planting
'Hungry grass' Geomancy & Earth dragons Planning with the fairies Feng shui Confirming the best home site
Connecting to the Dreaming Microclimates Survey the wildlife Trackways Vegetation mapping
Balance of the elements Sacred relationships with nature Hauntings and emotional debris Earth acupuncture Altering energy patterns Honouring spirit beings Troubles at boundaries
Loving the land Deva gardeners Dowsing in the garden Problems with metals Curvy gardens Keeping dragons happy Zone Five fairyland DIY sacred sites
Getting plants Trading energy The waste resource Free stuff
Preparation for earthworks Dam building The aftermath
Liquid waste Urine in the garden Humanure Devas and compost
Slow weeding Below the radar Less pests in polycultures Biodynamic approach
Discovering the land's magic Fairy warning Preparation for earthworks Magic flower crop Crone deva
We want natural woodlands! Sacred trees Plant sacred groves
Imagine House spirit Building biology Living Architecture
Save our seeds Cultivate good energy Celebration and thanks