The Living Centre: Permaculture in Canada
October 26, 2019, by Shantree Kacera
By Meghan Kelly
The Living Centre, founded in 1983, is an eco-spiritual education sanctuary in the countryside near London, Ontario. The Centre includes forest gardens, herb and vegetable gardens, orchards, and an edible medicine trail grown veganically. The Living Centre is also the first in North America, offering courses in veganic forest gardening and plant-based permaculture design.
The founders have a far-reaching vision of regenerative, natural beauty and responsibility for future generations, and they have worked toward creating a centre that will be resilient in the face of climate change. Founder Shantree Kacera, R.N., D.N., Ph., the grandson of an herbalist and an avid gardener since childhood, purchased the land as a young man who desired to return to nature. Shantree began to grow garlic using vegan, organic techniques and, at one point, was the largest distributor of organic garlic in Ontario and Quebec. After losing the majority of the garlic one year due to faulty storage by a distributor, Shantree saw the precarious nature of monoculture, that one factor can wipe out a year’s harvest. He began to see the value of imitating nature, creating biodiverse systems for food production and started moving toward forest gardening and permaculture techniques. Realizing his genuine interest in teaching, he eventually shifted from commercial agriculture to developing an education centre for enlightened living.
Now run by Shantree Kacera and Lorenna Bousquet-Kacera, their educational programmes are aimed at holistic human development, with teachings that promote peace, spiritual growth, physical and emotional health, and eco-sustainability. Shantree is an author and an Ayurvedic Medicine Practitioner with a doctorate in Nutritional Medicine and Herbalism, and Lorenna is a Certified Ayurvedic Living Nutrition, Permaculture Educator and Creativity Coach. Their courses include Herbalism, Primordial Movement, Live-Food Nutrition and Temperate Forest Gardening. The courses in forest gardening, offered through hands-on workshops and correspondence, teach about growing edible forest gardens in cooler climates and enhancing microclimates to grow a wider diversity of plants.
In 2010, realizing there was a growing interest and need for permaculture courses in their region, Lorenna and Shantree both became certified as Permaculture Design Teachers, studying at the Cold-Climate Permaculture Research Institute with teacher Dave Jacke, acclaimed author of Edible Forest Gardening. To raise food for the teacher certification course, they followed the CSA (community-supported agriculture) model and created a CSE (community-supported educators). They asked their supporters to contribute in advance to help them become qualified instructors in permaculture design. The idea worked, and those who contributed received discounts on future permaculture education. The Living Centre now offers internationally recognized PDCs (permaculture design courses) focusing on plant-based techniques. They offer PDCs over two weeks and a four-season permaculture design course taught on seven weekends throughout the year to learn year-round growing methods in colder climates. They also work toward building resilience in their local community by practicing bioregionalism, deep ecology and permaculture on their land. Lorenna and Shantree are original members of London, Ontario’s transition town movement and are actively involved in bringing a paradigm shift and permaculture re-design concepts to a city context.
The Living Centre’s Vegan Organic Gardens
The Living Centre’s 50-acre sanctuary comprises meadows and natural forests, with about 5 acres set aside to be cultivated. The herb gardens and vegetable gardens are planted in spirals, intertwining aesthetics with edible gardening. The Centre also includes a cherry grove, a pear orchard, and an edible medicine trail. Located in the heart of Carolinian, Canada, where the weather is relatively mild, pecans and peaches can be grown in the warmer microclimates on the property. Their gardens have incredible diversity. Over 500 species of herbs and edible medicinal plants are grown in the Sacred Medicine Wheel Herb Garden, and in total, more than 1,000 species of edible and medicinal plants are found at The Living Centre.
The gardens are mulched with local amendments of straw, hay, woodchips, and leaves. The Living Centre maintains sizeable compost piles and makes regular batches of nettle, kelp, and comfrey tea fertilizer. In the summer and the fall, the gardens provide a large portion of the food served at the Centre, and part of the harvest is frozen, dehydrated and Lacto-fermented for year-round nourishment. Their passive solar greenhouse, an Earthship made from tires and earth, yields fresh produce throughout the year, even during the Canadian winter. All meals served at The Living Centre are organic, live-food, and vegan. Shantree gardens in a vegan, organic way “for every reason under the sun.” With a love for animals, he would rather see animals thrive in the wild than become domesticated. He also finds that working directly with plants is simpler and more efficient than involving farmed animals in the system.
Forest gardening workshop
In June 2009, I visited The Living Centre to participate in their weekend Forest Gardening course. Staying in tents and rustic cabins, with access to an outdoor shower, compost toilets, and bioregional breakfasts, The Living Centre offers an immersive experience in low-impact living.
The Forest Gardening course began with a walk to observe different cultivation systems. We visited a neighbouring farmer’s field, an annual monoculture grown with artificial fertilizers. Showing us a shovelful of lifeless dirt, Shantree explained the importance of the soil food web. We visited several settings: a monocultured orchard, a recuperating meadow, a forest’s edge, a climax forest, and The Living Centre’s young forest gardens. We learned about the value of perennial plants, which can improve soil structure, draw up nutrients, self-mulch and self-fertilize, and provide a harvest for future generations. Shantree questioned, with the many available perennial plants, why humans had chosen to focus on cultivating annuals. When we plant annual monocultures, we struggle against the innate tendency of nature to create perennial polycultures. The key to forest gardening is to mimic nature – “gardening becomes easier”, says Shantree, “when we work with nature and allow the natural processes to do much of the work for us”. As perennial plants and trees might be present for decades, Shantree feels that this allows us to develop a personal relationship with the plants. Each morning, The Living Centre has a break called “tree time,” each person chooses a tree to sit under in silence, connecting with the natural world.
They are establishing forest gardens at The Living Centre by planting new forest gardens from scratch and fostering ecosystems around existing trees. The course covered the topic of guilding: to develop a forest garden by growing a community of supporting plants around the base of an established tree, with each plant serving a vital function, such as providing mulch or fixing nitrogen. On the second day of the course, we designed a guild as a group, and we finished the weekend course by planting this together around a fruit tree.
Shantree says that your garden is how you view the world—it reflects a mindset. Concerned about our society’s rapid loss of topsoil, he views himself not as a grower of plants but as a grower of healthy soil, aiming to replenish the fertility and long-term viability of the land. Shantree sees forest gardening as a long-term vision, a positive way to interact with future generations, and the place where agriculture and ecology meet.