Holly Hawk Landscape Design

Back in 1966 Alan Chadwick — an English actor, painter, pianist, and master horticulturist — was offered a chance to demonstrate the techniques of biodynamic (aka French intensive) gardening on a barren four-acre clay hillside at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus. Chadwick tackled the little “desert” (land that was so inhospitable that few weeds even grew there) with hand tools, a love for the garden that he knew the plot could become, and incredible energy. Before long the once dead-looking slope was a veritable paradise of vegetables and flowers, and a beacon that attracted students and followers.

Since then, biodynamic gardening (often referred to as permaculture or ”the method”) has slowly gained a reputation among organic gardeners in North America, largely through the efforts of Chadwick and John Jeavons (of Ecology Action of the Mid-Peninsula in Stanford, California). It was Jeavons who eventually took the technique — which Chadwick had synthesized from the intensive gardening practiced in turn-of-the-century France and the biodynamic theories developed by Rudolf Steiner in early 20th century Austria — and subjected it to careful modification and testing. He was always striving to produce the optimum yield from the smallest possible space.

I never saw a discontented tree. They grip the ground as though they liked it, and though fast rooted they travel about as far as we do.

—John Muir