Permaculture Holiday Reads for 2025

I can’t wait to get into this Permaculture Holiday Reads book-stack. All are books that I’ve been waiting to read for MONTHS, or have just come out, or just been discovered (by me)….

Like many folks, I sleep beside an aspirational book-stack. The tower-like shrine to ‘one day, when I have a few hours spare’ fantasy time and reading land…

This summer, though, I’m planning to make some headway.

Now that it’s high-summer here, there’s plenty of garden work to do (weeding, watering, generally keeping things alive, harvesting, weaving fences, more weeding) that doesn’t require my full brain’s attention… which means, it’s Audiobook season!

I will still have to rewind every fourth page when my attention strays to a bee or a flower and I miss the good bit, but that’s ok. I love having wise voices in my ears as I plant and weed and weave and play. I’ve included any audiobook versions that i could find to the notes below too.

In no particular order, here’s my upcoming picks. I’ve included links to the author’s work, website, and any tasty interviews I’ve listened to with them recently.

Loving Corrections - adrienne maree brown - Milkwood Holiday Reading

Loving Corrections – adrienne maree brown (Emergent Strategy series)

I’m so looking forward to digging into this one – I’ve loved amb’s work since I came across her book Pleasure Activism, and then two of their smaller (but huge) works –Emergent Strategy and We Will Not Cancel Us – were dear friends to me during the work of attempting to create and maintain community in a new place, during the Covid years.

Here’s what the back of the book has to say:

“Ethical, pondering, and wondrous, adrienne maree brown’s Loving Corrections is a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war.

In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of “loving corrections” a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another.

Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown’s indispensable writing is an invitation to us all.“

Loving Corrections – the book
Loving Corrections – audiobook
adrienne maree brown’s website
all of adrienne marie brown’s books
On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life (On Being podcast convo with amb)

The Land in our Bones – Layla K. Feghali

“Plantcestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria to the Sinai–Earth-based pathways to ancestral stewardship and belonging in diaspora…”

I began this book last winter, loved it, got distracted, and am coming back to read the whole thing. Diving into pockets of knowledge from the ‘crossroads’ (the Middle East) in personal and plant-based form seems a good way in, for hearts that are already struggling with the injustice of everything that is happening in this part of our world.

“Tying cultural survival to earth-based knowledge, Lebanese ethnobotanist, sovereignty steward, and cultural worker Layla K. Feghali offers a layered history of the healing plants of Cana’an (the Levant) and the Crossroads (“Middle East”) and asks into the ways we become free from the wounds of colonization and displacement.

Feghali remaps Cana’an and its crossroads, exploring the complexities, systemic impacts, and yearnings of diaspora. She shows how ancestral healing practices connect land and kin—calling back and forth across geographies and generations and providing an embodied lifeline for regenerative healing and repair.

How do we embody what binds us together while holding the ways we’ve been wrested apart? What does it mean to be of a place when extraction and empire destroy its geographies? What can we restore when we reach beyond what’s been lost and tend to what remains? How do we cultivate kinship with the lands where we live, especially when migration has led us to other colonized territories?

The Land in Our Bones asks us to reclaim the integrity of our worlds, interrogating colonization and defying its “cultures of severance” through the guidance of land, lineage, and love. It is an urgent companion for our times, a beckoning call towards belonging, healing, and freedom through tending the land in your own bones.”

The Land in Our Bones – book
The Land in Our Bones – audiobook
Layla’s website, River Rose Re-memberance
The Land in Our Bones – For The Wild Podcast – where I first learned of her work

Delicate Edible Birds – Lauren Groff

I’m looking forward to diving into this short story collection by Lauren, after having LOVED her newest book ‘The Vaster Wilds’ earlier this year (anyone else struggle with reading fiction sometimes? The Vaster Wilds is a good antidote to this).

Short stories (and I’m sure hers will be gripping, just like her novels) are my fave way to wind-down before sleep. Also good for beachy afternoons, I expect.

“Nine wildly unique, exquisitely symphonic tales, full of beauty, tragedy, and the sudden horror of shocking images….Groff moves among these wholly unrelated worlds with a vision that happily traps the reader. Highly recommended.” –LIBRARY JOURNAL

In other awesome news, when she’s not writing, Lauren leads a bookshop collective called The Lynx Books… a new general-interest bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, with an emphasis in books that are currently challenged or banned in Florida, as well as those by BIPOC authors, LGBTQ+ authors, and Florida authors…

…where they also hold events like Banned Book Club and offers free workshops on how to get such books re-stocked in your Florida school library. So good.

…ok ok this book is not strictly permaculture content, it’s true. But resting, and reading fun things IS essential to permaculture design, and life in general. So here we are.

Delicate Edible Birds – book
Delicate Edible Birds – audiobook

The Exhausted of the Earth – Politics in a Burning World – Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Ok So I really want to make my way through this book based on this conversation that Ajay had on the Upstream Podcast (do recommend, it’s fascinating) – and we’ve been talking about that conversation ever since.

“Climate change is not only about the exhaustion of the planet, it’s about the exhaustion of so many of us, our lives, our worlds, even our minds. So, what is to be done?

To answer this question, Ajay Singh Chaudhary brings together both the science and the politics of climate change. He shows how a new politics particular to the climate catastrophe demands a bitter struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of “business-as-usual” and all of us, those exhausted, in every sense of the word, by the status quo.“

I do expect this book to be quite dense but Ima gonna give it a go anyways. I rekon it will be worth it.

The Exhausted of the Earth – Politics in a Burning World – the book
Ajay Singh Chaudhary at The Brooklyn Institute

Costa’s Garden: Flowers – Costa Georgiadis & Brenna Quinlan

Yay, this collaboration has been brewing for a long time! Costa, host of Gardening Australia and all-round excellent human has teamed up for a series of kids books with the fabulous Brenna Quinlan – who has illustrated our two Milkwood books, plus many others besides.

Being Brenna and Costa, they’re celebrating this book launch with an east-coast tour of Australia with Formidiable Vegetable, the best party band who also offer great gardening advice in every song.

The first book in the series is ‘Costa’s Garden: Flowers‘ and I’m looking forward to them launching it at our local Cygnet Folk Festival in January. All the other tour dates (you should totally go) are here.

The Serviceberry – An Economy of Gifts and Abundance: Robin Wall Kimmerer

One of my fave all-time authors has a new book! 11 years after Braiding Sweetgrass, here it is. It’s little, it’s gorgeous. I’ll probably read it at least 5 times in the coming season.

“From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Braiding Sweetgrass, a bold and inspiring vision for how to orient our lives around gratitude, reciprocity, and community, based on the lessons of the natural world.

Indigenous scientist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer asks how can we learn from indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most?

Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude.

The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution insures its own survival.

As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.” As Elizabeth Gilbert writes, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a great teacher, and her words are a hymn of love to the world.”

The Serviceberry is an antidote to the broken relationships and misguided goals of our times, and a reminder that “hoarding won’t save us, all flourishing is mutual.”

The Serviceberry – book
The Serviceberry – audiobook
Robin’s most recent conversation w Emergence Podcast
The original essay that this book is based apon
Corn tastes better on the Honor System – another great essay of hers
Robin’s Website

The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth; Zoe Schlanger

After listening to a conversation with Zoe on the Emergence podcast, I started listening to this book as I work in our garden in the evening. It’s great! But I can’t underline the many pearlers of thought and revelation on my audiobook, so I’ll have to read the hard copy this summer.

I’ll let Robin tell it like it is (ha!) –

“Burning with open-minded curiosity, this exploration of the emerging revolution in plant science will challenge what you think you know and ignite a new way of seeing. Part detective story, field trip, and philosophy, this brilliant book stretches the mind toward a profound new understanding of the sophistication of under-appreciated plants.

I feel it as an antidote to arrogance, as it engenders humility, respect, and awe for the light eaters who make the world.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass

The Light Eaters – book
The Light Eaters – audiobook
Zoe’s website
The World Is a Prism, Not a Window – An Interview with Zoë Schlanger

The Earth Restorer’s Guide to Permaculture – Rosemary Morrow

Every summer I try to re-read one of my fave permaculture textbooks – and I ALWAYS find jewels of knowledge that speak to me in a different way than they did previously, which I last read the book.

This summer, it’s totally Rowe Morrow’s book. Re-issued and re-edited, this is one of the books we recommend to students all the time in the ‘if you were just going to read ONE permaculture book, choose this one‘ category.

This book is a lifetime of learning and observation, in many, many places that sit well outside the cosy backyard context. And it’s damn practical, too. So. Much. Good. Material within these pages…. and now with a foreword by Vandana Shiva.

Here’s a little bio about Rowe – “Rowe originally studied Agricultural Science at the Sorbonne, in Paris, but then developed a passion for learner-centred teaching in the community. She walked away from formal education and has been teaching permaculture for 30 years.

To this day she is still fascinated by adult non-formal education and the respect it demands from the teacher for students’ prior knowledge and skills.

She regards teaching and learning as generous reciprocal acts and has taught permaculture in many unusual and challenging places off the beaten track. Her current focus is Permaculture for Refugees and she has been training more people to teach permaculture around the world, and particularly in refugee camps. “

If you haven’t read it, I really couldn’t recommend The Earth Users Guide more. I’m looking forward to sitting under a tree with it very soon.