The Living Centre: Permaculture in Canada
By Meghan Kelly
Spirit of the Earth, The Living Centre & Living Arts Institute, 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 that are all grown veganically. The Living Centre is also the first place in North America to offer courses in veganic forest gardening and plant-based permaculture design.
The founders have a far-reaching vision of sustainability, natural beauty and responsibility to future generations, and have worked toward creating a centre that will be resilient in the face of climate change. Founder Shantree Kacera, D.N., Ph.D., the grandson of an herbalist and an avid gardener since his childhood, purchased the land as a young man in a desire 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 that his true interest lay in teaching, he eventually changed his focus 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 a Certified Ayurvedic Living Nutrition, Permaculture Educator and a 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 by 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. In order to raise funds to partake in the teacher certification course, they followed the model of CSA’s (community supported agriculture) 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 is now offering internationally recognized PDC’s (permaculture design courses) with a focus on plant-based techniques. They offer PDC’s over two weeks, as well as a four-season permaculture design course that is taught on seven weekends throughout the year, to learn year-round growing methods in colder climates. Practicing bioregionalism, deep ecology and permaculture on their land, they are also working toward building resilience in their local community. 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 is largely made up of 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, it is even possible to grow pecans and peaches 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 they also make regular batches of nettle, kelp, and comfrey tea fertilizer. In the summer and the fall, the gardens provide a large portion of the food that is 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 take part 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 systems of cultivation. 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, with their ability to improve soil structure, draw up nutrients, self-mulch and self-fertilize, and to provide a harvest for future generations. Shantree questioned, with the multitude of perennial plants that are available, 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” where each person chooses a tree to sit under in silence, connecting with the natural world.
They are currently establishing forest gardens at The Living Centre, both by planting new forest gardens from scratch and by fostering ecosystems around existing trees. The course covered the topic of guilding: to develop a forest garden by planting a community of supporting plants around the base of an established tree, with each plant serving an important 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 the way you garden is the way you view the world—it reflects a mindset. Concerned about our society’s rapid loss of topsoil, he views himself not as simply 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, as the place where agriculture and ecology meet.