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  • From: Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] kinship gardens and permaculture
  • Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 19:18:33 -0800


On April 2, 2003, at 11:13 AM, miekal wrote:

There's certainly some overlap between kinship and permaculture gardens, but no one that I know of has explored how extensive it is [snip]

But how could one possibly know unless you embrace a spirit of experimentation & opening yourself as a designer to the possibilities the biological universe has to offer?

I'm puzzled at the argumentative tone of your response, miekal. I was writing to agree with you, and to find more overlap by proposing just such avenues of exploration. Perhaps it's my training as a scientist: The way to improve an idea is to focus on its weak points or contradictions, and question them in hopes of making the idea stronger or connecting it to what we already agree on. But I think we're all in pretty close agreement.

As Scott has pointed out, the main difficulty in reconciling Pc and kinship gardens--and I am very interested in combining them--is that taxonomic relationship between plants has no correlation with their ecological or functional relationship, so plants arranged by kinship won't necessarily work together in guilds or any other way. Close relatives (at the genus or species level) can be very divergent in their needs, yields, or functions.

We often sing the praises of diversity, but ecologists have shown conclusively that simple diversity of species does not give you stability or resilience or any ecological benefit, contrary to what some Pc people assume (I'm writing an article for the next Activist on the subject, and am playing hooky from it right now). It's the diversity of functional relationships (not species) that creates stability because functional diversity gives both redundancy (protection from failure) and makes sure that all the different jobs to create a whole system are being done. So selecting only for genetic diversity, though it's educational and species-saving, won't help us create a functioning ecosystem. But I still think kinship gardens tie into Pc. Here's how:

There are two principal ways of creating a kinship garden: 1) do extensive "grow-outs" of closely related species in the same genus or subfamily, or move up the taxonomic hierarchy and 2) grow selected species from an array of related families. The first method is great for generating biodiversity but doesn't create functional relationships: 10 solanums don't make a guild. This method might give you insurance against crop failure; if one variety dies, others might thrive. But closely related species don't always provide the same crop, right? Here are 4 sunflowers: sunchokes, edible seed, oilseed, and a pretty flower. No redundancy there, so little failure protection. Again, genetic similarity does not predict similarities at functional or ecological levels.

The second method seems more directly applicable to Pc: Making careful choices from different families based on relationship with known useful species, as Rick describes, can help with guild design and functional relationship. Or you could find a known guild of tropical plants (there are lots more of them than temperate guilds) and use kinship to help you find related temperate species to try as a guild. But I think you'd need to know something about each species instead of taking genetic pot luck.

One of Mushroom's biggest insights, overlooked by mainstream scientists (Peace Seeds J. 9:46-50) is that by placing some new plant DNA data into his kinship maps, he's confirmed that temperate plants in general radiated out of older tropical groups, and those old tropical groups are all related to each other. So we can turn to the tropics for lessons about temperate plants; the tropical plants did it first.

It's a potentially fruitful field, but we need to start planting.

Toby




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