Learning to Live Peace: Designing a Homegarden in Sri Lanka

Post written by Logan Sander, March 4, 2017

Here we are in Pitikele village trying to plant a “traditional” homegarden, but in many ways how we’re going about that is as foreign as we are. I believe our homegarden will be what we hope it to be (i.e. diverse, representative, productive, beautiful, educational, etc.), but it won’t be traditional in the sense that it came about the way that other homegardens in Pitikele do. I’ll explain why this isn’t a problem and try to make clear our approach to designing and creating a homegarden.

Obviously, we’re neither from Pitikele, nor do we have a great depth of personal experience with the types of plants we’re growing (I’m from Alaska, Laura is from Virginia and Blair is from Washington State). As a result, we’ve been forced to adopt a somewhat novel approach to our homegarden. When a person in Pitikele plants a homegarden, it’s a long-term, highly iterative and experimental process. Instead of up-front planning, I believe “traditional” homegardens arise out of patterns observed in countless neighboring homegardens, skills learned early in life through helping and watching in the family garden, and through a personal (and somewhat variable) understanding of the requirements of each plant. We’ve had peeks into this process by observing Someratane and Tillekaratne’s work on their own gardens, and my impression is that folks opportunistically gather plants they desire to grow and plant them where it makes sense to them – gradually, over a period of time that spans generations. And it works - beautiful gardens develop with no maps, no deadlines, no external labor to organize, no design principles, no grand plans. Since we don’t have these experiences to draw from, and we’re trying to get this garden up and running in a year or so, our approach is necessarily more cerebral, planned and abbreviated. We’re hoping the end result is recognizable to local folks as a homegarden (we think it will be!).

Our approach to designing this garden borrowed heavily from our experiences with permaculture design, professional forestry and our gardening experience. In permaculture design, a space is divided into “zones” that reflect the management needs and priorities of a place. For example, “Zone 1” includes those areas around a home where the manager/occupant is most likely to interact, i.e. the walkway from the car to the front door, the area around the patio, the planter box outside the kitchen window, and so forth. This is where one would concentrate those things that have frequent management needs (watering, weeding, etc.) and produce frequent yields where convenience is a key attribute (culinary herbs, medicinal plants, etc.). The complete schema is as follows (adapted to our context):

Zone 1: near the house, frequent maintenance and/or yields, enjoyable aesthetics, access is most important; e.g. culinary herbs, frequently used medicinal plants, flowers, plants that need to be grown near the home.

Zone 2: moderate maintenance needs; e.g. vegetable crops, fruit and nut trees, medicinal plants, perennial crops.

Zone 3: low-maintenance, more extensive tall-tree orchards, timber trees, etc.

Zone 4: e.g. woodlot, natural forest management.

Zone 5: “wilderness,” or at least, unmanaged areas.

Zones 1-3 are indicated. Zones 4-5 are not labeled, but are beyond 3 including the green area

Here is an example of a permaculture design describing zone distinctions.

Because there are three of us designing our homegarden, we thought the concept of zones would help us to divide the work so we wouldn’t need to “design by committee.” This way, with constant consultation and feedback, we could each focus on our own design problems, keeping in mind that the relationships between our designs were as important as anything else. Laura would tackle Zone 1 around the home, I would take on the surrounding Zone 2 fruit trees and Blair would handle what we call Zone 3, the outlying tree gardens of coconuts, jakfruit and other tall, widely-spaced trees.

It doesn’t take long to realize that traditional homegardens blur many of the boundaries between these zones, though I believe the categories are useful. We observe at every homegarden a zone around the dwelling that has potted plants, ornamental flowers, medicinals, everyday food plants, etc. This high species diversity, low-abundance region has been called the “patio” in Sri Lankan research articles, and it corresponds precisely with the Zone 1 definitions of most permaculture designers. Zone 2 is not quite as tidy, but we’ve still recognized a rather tight ring of fruit, nut and timber trees around the home that neatly corresponds to Zone 2. Zone 3 is overall looser, as Zone 2 tends to cut into and between areas of Zone 3.

It’s important to remember that these categories are merely social, behavioral distinctions – nothing will be permanently marked off to show them in our garden. Instead, the evolving patterns of use and maintenance, combined with plant structure and development, will mean that these zones are continually redefined. They are really categories of the behaviors of the people managing the garden, as expressed through their priorities and habits.

We further informed our design process by conducting a site analysis, much as a forester would do when writing a management plan for a family forest. We mapped out the existing vegetation that we wanted to retain, the design constraints (views, powerlines, buried pipes, etc.), basic hydrological attributes, soils, the path of the sun, and access opportunities across the homegarden. Based on historic photos and our soil pits we were able to reconstruct the recent history of the homegarden area, recognizing some areas of relatively rich topsoil and several areas of redistributed subsoil fill. From this, the three of us put on our boots and spent a day flagging out our zone delineations. Next, we planned which species should go where. In order to determine this, we relied on our observations, our conversations with local gardeners about our specific plans, our knowledge of the site requirements of each plant, and the built in limitations (view shed, hosue proximity, powerlines, floodplains, etc).

We split up each zone into smaller parcels in order to organize our work and have something to refer to when planning. Each parcel can be identified by a number (zone) and letter. We’ve included Laura’s and my maps of zones 1 and 2 here. After discussions with our local colleagues and those at Yale, we’ve decided to plant out a more modest area this spring, saving the remainder for upcoming fellows. Part of the reason for this is time – we can do our site preparation now while it’s dry, but most of our planting must happen during the rainy season. We all have to leave for home in June, and the southwest monsoon generally begins in May, leaving us a short amount of time to wrap things up and get plants in the ground. Also, much of the soil we’re working with (especially in zone 2) is sandy-gravely subsoil that was pushed around during the groundwork for the field station. It is extremely low in nutrients, droughty and low in organic content. We don’t know how our plants will do in these areas, so it makes sense to only plant out part of our nursery in the hopes that we can learn something in the meantime about their success and adjust our planting/site preparation accordingly… sort of like, not putting all of our eggs in one basket... As a result, before we leave this summer we hope to plant all of zone 1, parcels 2B and 2C, and whatever areas of zone 3 we can manage.

The included maps are only a first iteration. Since we created these maps, we’ve already made many changes and as we visit other homegardens (we’ve been to over 50 so far!), botanical gardens (Perideniya Garden in Kandy is incredible!), and receive more feedback, other changes will surely be made. Many more trees, shrubs and herbs will eventually fill out the space after these species are planted – some will be planted by us as we observe and learn and more will be planted in the future as more fellows continue our work. It’s fun to imagine what this place will look like in 5-10 years!

Zone 1B is immediately in front of the veranda and will include mostly ornamental flowers. There is also a passionfruit climbing a tree and the empty areas will fill in with orchids, pitcher plants, and ferns that were cut back for planting.