Permaculture, the whole tour — Andrew Millison's course, told my way

Andrew Millison teaches in the Horticulture department at Oregon State. He introduces himself elsewhere with the line "In my almost 30 years as a permaculture designer traveling the world…", which is long enough that he's watched several of his own designs grow up. The intro course is a MOOC — a massive open online course, meaning anyone with a connection can take the whole thing and nobody asks for a card.

Four weeks. Week one defines the thing. Week two reads the landscape. Week three is design methods and principles. Week four splits by climate — drylands, tropics, temperate — and walks through soil, water, food, shelter, energy, ecology and community. Students get sorted into their climate group so they meet the people who share their problems.

And there's a reason it's free that isn't marketing, which we'll get to in a minute. It's one of the three ethics, doing its job in public.

Here's the tea: this isn't a gardening series with a philosophy bolted on. It's a design course that happens to end up in a garden. 🎯

Bill Mollison, permaculture's co-founder, coined the word by mashing permanent and agriculture together. Then he pointed out the obvious: you can't have a permanent agriculture without a culture to hold it up. So it's permanent culture too. Cute. Also load-bearing.

Millison quotes Mollison's own definition, and it's worth reading slowly: "It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing for their food, energy, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way." Notice what's missing. No plants. No compost. No raised beds. It's a definition about arranging things.

"Permanent" here means something specific: stable, enduring, able to keep going without degrading. And the course pushes one step past that. Sustainable means it can keep going. Regenerative means it makes more than it took to build. That's the actual target — soils, clean water, food, materials and biodiversity that are in better shape in year ten than in year one.

Here's the tea: sustainable is breaking even, babe. Regenerative is compound interest. Permaculture is aiming at the second one. 📈

Week one doesn't open with a seed tray. It opens with the planet at night on Google Earth, and Millison says: follow the lights. Where they're bright, resources are concentrated. Where you know people live and it's dark, they aren't.

His figure, citing the International Energy Agency for 2013: roughly 1.2 billion people, about 17% of the world, with no access to electricity at all. In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than a third of nearly a billion people had any. Africa holds six times the people of Western Europe and a fraction of the light. That number is over a decade old now and has improved since — the shape of the argument hasn't.

Then he zooms to Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic. The border is visible from orbit: forest on one side, bare on the other, because Haiti's trees went for charcoal. Clouds form over the forested half and go missing over the bare half — forests and atmospheric moisture are the same system. Haiti loses an estimated 6,000 hectares of topsoil a year, and it arrives in the Caribbean as brown water after every big storm.

Without soil you can't grow food. Without food you can't stay. That's the chain the course wants you to see before it lets you draw anything. 😔

Here's the tea: permaculture starts with a photo of a wound, not a photo of a veg bed. If that feels heavy, that's the point — the design only means something because the problem is real.

Earth care. Protect the natural systems that still work, rebuild the ones that don't. Not sentiment — if the water, soil, forests and air go, so do the conditions for us.

People care. Design for people's health and security, because people with stable lives take better care of the land they live on. Desperate people can't afford the long view. Nobody plants a walnut in a war.

Fair share. Cap your own consumption and put the surplus back into the first two. Millison then does something I properly respect: he says out loud that this free course is the third ethic — Oregon State's surplus, handed back to the world as an education. Put your money where your napkin is. 💅

Alongside the ethics sit the directives, which are more like habits of mind: design with nature, and design for culture. He shows hand-built Chinese rice terraces to make the first point and the village of Nahalal in Israel, laid out in 1921 (a moshav, though the course calls it a kibbutz) with the community in the middle and the fields on the outside, to make the second. Then pattern literacy — the branching of an Amazon tributary is the branching of a tree is the branching of your own blood vessels. Learn to see the pattern and you stop needing a recipe for every situation.

Here's the tea: the ethics aren't decoration on the front of the course. Fair share is the reason you can watch it. 🎁

This is the bit of week one I'd tattoo on a garden fork. Three kinds of investment, and every choice you make on a plot is one of them.

🚗 A degenerative investment loses value from the moment you commit. A car. It works, it does its job, and it costs you fuel, parts and patience until it dies in a scrapyard. You never get the money back.

🌽 A generative investment pays out in proportion to what you put in. Annual vegetables. Prepare the bed, sow, weed, water, feed, harvest — and you get the corn. Skip a year and you get nothing, because the field will happily grow something else without asking. You put in, you take out, you're back at the start line.

🍎 A regenerative investment gets better on its own. A fruit tree in the right spot yields more each year for decades. You do the hard part once — good place, good planting, see it through establishment — and then it pays shade, habitat, windbreak, wood, leaf mulch and something for the kids to climb, possibly long after you're gone.

None of the three is forbidden, honey. You'll still own a car and you'll still sow beans. The discipline is knowing which one you're doing, and tilting the ratio a bit further every year.

Here's the tea: most garden spending is degenerative in a nice bag. Ask of every purchase: in ten years, is this worth more or less than today? 🍎

Millison draws the whole method as a tree, and the proportions are the lesson.

The roots are observation. How water flows, how wind blows, where soil gets deposited, how fire moves, how plants arrange themselves. Not just the average year — the extremes. And also how humans lived here: where indigenous people put their crops, where they put their villages, and why. Those roots pull from ecology, hydrology, climatology, botany, anthropology, architecture, engineering, urban planning, forestry, marine science. It's an omnivorous discipline.

The trunk is the design. And here's the line from the course I keep thinking about: "I always caution students about trying too hard on the design. If it's not coming easily, then perhaps you need to do more observation and study." Struggling is not a sign you need to be cleverer, babe. It's a sign you're guessing.

Then implementation, then feedback — which he argues is where permaculture differs from most design systems, because the loop back to observation is part of the diagram, not an afterthought.

And the tree has seven branches you're meant to spiral through, starting at home and working outward:

• 🌿 Built environment
• 🌿 Tools and technology
• 🌿 Culture and education
• 🌿 Health and spiritual well-being
• 🌿 Finance and economics
• 🌿 Land tenure and community
• 🌿 Land and nature stewardship

Yes, finance and land tenure are on that list. Permaculture claims commerce, governance and access to land as design material, on the grounds that the ponds and orchards don't happen without them. Ambitious. We'll come back to that in Real talk.

Here's the tea: if your design is hard, you haven't looked enough. Go outside and stare at the wet corner for another season. 👀

Week two is one question: where am I? And the answer is built from the outside in, which is the part most people skip.

Latitude first, because it sets day length and sun intensity and where you sit relative to the jet streams and trade winds that shift moisture around the planet. Then maritime versus continental — an ocean is a giant thermal buffer, so coastal places swing less and inland places swing hard. Then elevation: colder and wetter as you climb, warmer and drier as you drop. Then solar aspect, because every hill has a hot side and a cool side.

On aspect the course is refreshingly precise, and it uses "sun-facing" and "pole-facing" instead of south and north so it works in both hemispheres. Sun-facing is hot and dry. East gets the morning light, so it warms earliest — which matters enormously in spring, when frost needs burning off. West is the brutal one: the sun arrives late, into air that's already hot. Pole-facing is cooler, shadier, and stays moist.

Then he zooms to the watershed, and this is where a fist comes in. Make one. The knuckles are the main ridge, the spine of the landscape. The bones running back from them are the primary ridges, and between each pair sits a primary valley — its own catchment. That pattern is a fractal: every primary ridge is the main ridge for a smaller set. Most of the planet's terrain is built this way, and you're holding the map.

The same shape shows up everywhere once you've seen it. A tree's branches, a river's tributaries, the veins in your arm. Millison calls the whole thing the core model and credits it straight to Mollison's Designer's Manual, page 73, where a tree is described as a vortex moving too slowly for us to notice. 🌀

Here's the tea: your postcode tells you where the post goes. Your watershed tells you where your water goes, and only one of those is designing your garden.

If you take one thing from the whole course, take this one: on any site, you design the water first. Paths, planting, buildings, animals and energy all come after, because water decides where they can sensibly go.

The rule of thumb is to keep water in its place of highest potential — which means as high up as you can hold it, because everything below a stored litre can be reached by gravity and everything above it needs a pump. Your roof is the highest point on your plot and the cleanest water you'll ever catch, since it never touches the ground.

Then: slow it, spread it, sink it. Millison's worked example is lovely to follow. Put a pond where the slope breaks from steep to gentle. The dam wall becomes the road. The road's drainage feeds the pond. Now there's a line across your site with drier land above it and gravity-watered land below it, and the road — wetter than its surroundings and visited daily — turns out to be the obvious place for your highest-value trees. Nobody planned that on purpose. It fell out of the water.

Two facts that reframe a forest. More than half of a tree is water, so a forest on a mountain is functionally a lake standing up. And when you strip that forest, you don't just lose the sponge — you change the duration. Water that used to take a year to travel from the top of a watershed to the bottom can do it in a week. Or a day. It's the same rain; it just stops having time to soak in, and the water table quietly drops.

His mascot for the fix is the beaver — Oregon State's mascot too, which he clearly enjoys. Beavers dam, trap sediment and turn a valley into sponges, and Europeans trapped them out of an entire continent for their pelts. So: be the beaver. And start at the top of the watershed, where small structures are enough. At the bottom you're arguing with a river. 🦫

Here's the tea: you're not managing an amount of water, honey. You're managing how long it stays. Duration is the whole game. ⏳

Week three adds a second tool, borrowed from the Australian P. A. Yeomans and his keyline design, which fed into permaculture early on. It's an ordering: design the things you can't easily change before the things you can.

• 1. Climate — you can't design it. You can only choose it, and most people can't even do that.
• 2. Landform — the shape of the hill. Not moving, not for you.
• 3. Water — the first line you actually get to draw. Everything downstream of it is your call.
• 4. Access — paths and roads, placed to serve the water, not to fight it.
• 5. Trees — decades long. Site them once, apologise for a lifetime.
• 6. Structures — the house, the shed, the greenhouse — placed after the water and the trees.
• 7. Subdivision — fences, beds, management blocks. Cheap. Movable.
• 8. Soil — last. The easiest thing on the whole list to change.

Look where soil sits. Dead last, and the course says plainly that it's the easiest element to alter once the water, roads, trees and fencing are in place. For a website that spends a whole faculty on the soil food web, that stings a little. It's also correct. Compost fixes soil in a few seasons. Nothing fixes a tree planted in the wrong place, or a shed sitting in the frost pocket.

The example he walks through is Wolf Gulch Farm in southern Oregon, designed by permaculturist Tom Ward: high desert, around 500 mm of rain in a normal year, a south-facing valley. Swales zigzag storm water back and forth across the slope instead of letting it bolt down the gulch. Tree rows do four jobs at once, including deflecting the cold air that slides downhill at night and the hot wind that comes up the valley by day.

Here's the tea: everyone wants to start with the soil because the soil is the fun part. Start with the water and the trees, sweetheart — the soil will still be there in March. 🎚️

Only in week four does the course tell you what to actually do, and it splits three ways — drylands, tropics, temperate — because the same technique can be salvation in one and vandalism in another. Here's the temperate slice, which is ours.

Soil. A guest lecture from Jacob Kollen, a former student with a master's in soil science and hydrology, makes a point I hadn't heard put so cleanly: what matters in soil isn't the stuff, it's the space. Like a house — you don't live in the bricks, you live in the rooms. Pore size decides whether soil can conduct water, hold it, and hand it back at a pressure a root can actually pull against. Temperate soils tend to land on a workable mix of sand, silt and clay, with pores in all three sizes, and — unlike the tropics, where everything decomposes as fast as it falls — organic matter actually accumulates. We are, soil-wise, extremely lucky.

Trees. Mollison's recommendation, quoted in the course, is at least 20 to 30% of a permaculture landscape in trees for windbreak and forage. Every leaf is a small solar collector; the canopy filters dust and breaks the fall of raindrops so they land instead of hitting bare soil like tiny hammers.

Food. In the temperate zone the limiting factor isn't heat or water, it's light — so the recurring move is the suntrap: a horseshoe of planting or building open to the sun side, closed everywhere else. The idealised temperate landscape in the course is a mosaic of field, forest, hedgerow and orchard, with fields rotating between grazing, crops and cover.

Shelter. Elongate the building east–west, put the glass on the sun-facing side, keep it minimal on the shady side and the west, plant evergreens on the pole side against the cold wind, and insulate hard — because in a temperate winter it can be cloudy for weeks and the sun won't be bailing you out.

Energy. First reduce the need, then pick whatever renewable your site is actually rich in. He's visibly annoyed about water heating, and cites Israel, where solar hot water on new homes has been the rule for decades and around 90% of them have one. Boiling water with a power station, in a sunny country, in this economy. 😤

Here's the tea: a technique isn't good or bad, it's suited or unsuited. Annual veg is fine in a temperate climate and quietly destructive in the tropics — same spade, different planet.

The course closes on community, and it flips its own question: week two asked where am I?, the last week asks who am I? — on the argument that you're largely defined by your relationships, and that those relationships are designable too.

Millison's line, borrowed from his own teacher Brad Lancaster, is "nets in the flow." People move through a place the way water moves through a landscape. You already know what you'd do with fast water: slow it, spread it, give it somewhere to sit and soak in. Do that with people, flowers. Function follows structure. Build a bench and people sit. Hang grapes over the bench and they sit and eat. Someone else walks past and stops to talk. He calls that the beginning of world peace, which is either very silly or completely right, and I've decided it's the second one. 🍇

The final session isn't Millison at all — it's designer Javan Kerby Bernakevitch, and he does something clever with the zone model: he turns it on you. Your zones of brilliance sit where three things overlap. Your inherent gifts, the skills where one unit of effort gives you two back. Your perennial passions, the subjects you keep circling back to — check your bookshelf, check your browser history, no judgement. And your perceived problems: not what you love, but which problem you love to struggle with. Where those three meet is a niche, from the old French for "to nest."

Then a dare to finish, from the same session: the 10/10/100 challenge. Ten days, ten hours, a hundred of your local currency. Turn something you learned into something physical. Deliberately small. Deliberately soon. It exists because courses like this one are very good at producing people who feel enlightened on a sofa.

Here's the tea: the last assignment isn't a garden plan, it's a deadline. Ten days, ten hours, a hundred euro. Go. 🎤

The course is a design system, not a body of evidence. The twelve principles are heuristics — good questions, sharpened by decades of practice. They aren't tested hypotheses, and permaculture as a whole has far less peer-reviewed backing than the confidence in the videos suggests. Individual pieces are well studied (agroforestry yields, water harvesting, cover cropping, passive solar). The package as a package mostly isn't. Use it as a way of thinking, not as proof.

"The design becomes obvious" is optimism. Millison says that if you've done a thorough site analysis, the design falls out and you shouldn't have to strain. That's a beautiful teaching device and it is not always true. Sometimes you've observed perfectly and the site simply has two good options and a real trade-off. Struggling doesn't always mean you were lazy.

Trees make rain — with an asterisk. The course states that forests promote rainfall and that cutting them reduces it. Locally and regionally, moisture recycling through evapotranspiration is well established. Exactly how far downwind that reaches, and how much of continental rainfall depends on it, is still argued about hard in the literature. It's a real mechanism with a contested magnitude.

He tells you when he's guessing, so I will too. In the watershed-democracy video he works out that only about a quarter of American houses are well oriented for the sun, and he says on camera that he's "going to make a bit of a leap here." He is. It's a back-of-the-envelope estimate, not a survey. I like that he flagged it; keep flagging it in your head when the numbers get round.

And Oregon is not Flanders. This is where you have to translate rather than copy:

• 💧 Our rain isn't their rain. Oregon gets a soaking winter and a bone-dry summer, so "slow it, spread it, sink it" is nearly always right there. We get somewhere around 800 mm spread across the whole year, on ground that is often wet in winter anyway. Slowing water down on heavy Flemish clay with a high water table is how you drown a young fruit tree. Half the time our problem is the opposite problem.
• 🧱 Clay behaves differently. The soil lecture's temperate ideal is a balanced loam. A lot of us have something stickier, which holds water beautifully and gives it back reluctantly, and compacts if you look at it wrong in February.
• 📏 Zones 3, 4 and 5 don't exist on four ares. Most of the worked examples are farms of tens of hectares. On a normal garden the whole plot is zone 1 and 2, and that's fine — the tool still works, it just has fewer rings. Don't force a forage zone into a courtyard.
• 📋 You can't just dig here. In Flanders, changing ground level, excavating a pond, felling trees or working near a waterway generally needs a permit, and what's allowed depends on your municipality and the planning designation of the parcel. Millison's students grab a shovel in the next scene. Ask your gemeente first — the swale is not worth the letter. 📨

Last thing. The course promises, more or less, to help fix the world. I don't think that's cynical and I don't think it's harmless either — "permaculture provides solutions for these problems" is a big sentence to put next to deforestation, poverty and climate change. What it genuinely gives you is a way of looking at a place, in a sensible order, before you spend money. That's not fixing the world. It's quite a lot, though. 🌍