Our Permaculture Roots, Shoots and Seeds
We drew a lot of our inspiration from our friendship with Bill Mollison from 1979 and doing hands-on Permaculture with him in both his and our gardens. It was Bill who encouraged us to launch a national seed saving network. Here is a photoessay on our Permaculture roots, the shoots and seeds produced.
LEFT: Bill and Michel in Bill's garden RIGHT: Bill and Jude in his garden at Tyalgum in mid 1980s
Our Early Permaculture History
In 1977 Michel Fanton, the future co-founder of Seed Savers, established mixed gardens he called “Mimosa” on two acres of steep cow paddocks in northern New South Wales, Australia.
Michel had been inspired by the rich home gardens and peasant cultures of his homeland France, as well as the ares where he had lived for much of the 1960s and 1970s:- French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia. Fukuoka’s “One Straw Revolution” supplied the strategies of using nurse trees and succession planting in the establishment of the orchard in 1977, the year of the birth of Michel's second daughter, Aimee. These threads came together with the first plantings of a multitude of leguminous trees and shrubs. Interestingly enough, a preponderance of these were Acacia dealbata subspecies Mollisima (though Fukuoka had dubbed it "Morishima").
Michel realised that he was on the way to practising Permaculture principles when he read "Permaculture One". He attended a talk by Bill Mollison in Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia in 1979 and invited Bill to visit his experimental gardens. Bill liked what he saw and returned many times to "Mimosa" over the next twelve years. Convinced by the logic of Permaculture and Bill's charismatic personality, Michel thickened his perennial plantings and became a vocal advocate, distributing hundreds of copies of "Permaculture One" and "Permaculture Two".
In 1981 Michel teamed with Jude who had had eleven years' experience of teaching social sciences, history and literature in South Australia where she was born. They extended the intensive home gardens by another acre, harvested seeds wherever they went, propagated fruit and leguminous trees and shrubs and significantly increased "Mimosa"’s diversity.
In the 1980s Michel and Jude started to open up their subtropical Permaculture gardens to multitudes of visitors and some television crews.
Bill at our first Permaculture Gardens, “Mimosa”
When Bill Mollison moved from Tasmania around 1984 to nearby Tyalgum on the NSW/Queensland border, he frequently visited the Fanton family and gardens, recounting into the night permaculturesque stories from his latest travels. The Fantons learned by doing with Bill, working in either his or their gardens together, exchanging cuttings, rare tubers, runners and bulk seeds and stories from indigenous (agri)cultures, and food. Seed Savers was conceived during this time and formally commenced in March, 1986.
Bill Mollison Taught Courses at "Mimosa"
Establishing Second Permaculture Garden in Byron Bay
Fantons take a PDC
Feeling the need to formalise their Permaculture skills and experiences, Jude and Michel took Permaculture Design Certificate courses in 1987. Jude took hers with Lea Harrison near Tyalgum and concomitantly Michel his with Bill Mollison in Taree. Bill offered Michel's course for free and paid him to teach on it.
Fantons Teaching Permaculture Courses
Following in Bill's footsteps Michel and Jude Fanton taught eighteen Permaculture Design Courses in nine countries always including a strong biodiversity and seed production component. They started in 1988 with an Introduction to Permaculture Workshops and taught their first Permaculture Design Courses in Nimbin in 1989. See posters for some of these events below.
Jude and Michel went on to teach Permaculture Design Certificate courses in several countries. Bill Mollison sent Jude to South Africa to teach two Permaculture Design Certificate courses in 1992 and to Palau in 1994 to co-teach one after he had taught the first PDCs in each country.
• two courses at Camp Hill just north of Capetown, South Africa in 1992
LEFT: Participants of first design course, Jude at left. RIGHT: Design exercise at Camp Hill South Africa
- Co-teaching a Permaculture Design Certificate course in Palau, Micronesia, in 1994.
LEFT: Jude, right, teaching Permaculture on beach in Palau. RIGHT: A beach hut served well for the participants design exercise in sand.
- Other Permaculture courses Michel and Jude taught or co-taught in the 1990s and early 2000s were in Cuba in 1996 for Agricultura Urbana (Dept of Urban Agriculture), the UK in 1996, Cambodia in 1998 for the Dept of Women, Fiji in 1999 and Japan in 2000, East Timor in 2002 for CARITAS and Afghanistan in 2002 at the Herat Faculty of Agriculture,
LEFT: Jude teaching Permaculture at Permaculture Centre. RIGHT: Permaculture teacher, Shitara-san, took this shot outside Permaculture Centre of Japan, 2000
LEFT: PDC at Ragman's Lane Farm in Gloucestershire, UK, '96 RIGHT: Jude, left, teaching on Permaculture Design Course in Havana, Cuba, '96
Bill encourages Fantons to Establish Seed Savers in 1986
Bill Mollison encouraged the Fantons to establish The Seed Savers’ Network. Fancying they would create a local seed exchange, the Fantons were taken aback when Bill said, “Go national”.
Later as the Fantons considered a legal structure, Bill advised a pair of Trusts and, acting as settlor, he put a few banknotes in between two slices of bread in an onion bag, saying “at least you can eat the bread.”
Bill Mollison at Seed Savers Annual Conferences
During the 1990s Bill gave the keynote addresses at Seed Savers Annual Conferences whenever in-country, always challenging sacred cows and conventional paradigms. He also has the knack of gathering fascinating people around him.
LEFT: Notice of Seed Saving Conference in 1995. RIGHT: Bill Mollison at the Fantons with some of his international Permaculture teachers after the International Permaculture Convergence in Perth, 1996.
Our Promotion of Permaculture in the Media
The Fantons spread the Permaculture seed message far and wide - to the tune of close to one thousand appearances and articles - at conferences, regular regional radio shows, newspapers and magazines, producing over 600 articles. They wrote a regular page for the Permaculture International Journal from 1995 to 2000. Their gardens in Byron Bay have been photographed and filmed as a thriving example of Permaculture.
LEFT: Magazine article around 1996. RIGHT: Lunch served from the Seed Gardens to volunteers and Permaculture course participants with seeds drying behind.
LEFT: Orchard with plants originating in South and East Asia on the left and Central Asia on the right. RIGHT The kitchen garden has nine raised beds, planted with both annual and perennial herbs, flowers and vegetables.
Images and drawings of Jude and Michel's Permaculture garden in the early 1980s featured on the back cover of Introduction to Permaculture and in the Permaculture Designers' Manual.
LEFT: Bill in our gardens on the back cover of the original Introduction to Permaculture RIGHT: Mimosa gardens, bottom left, on page 160 of Permaculture: The Designers' Manual
Thank you and long live Bill Mollison!
We continue to draw inspiration from our training, study and experience of Permaculture and feel very privileged to have been able to present sacks of giant wild harvested oysters and wild orange Lacter delicieux pine mushrooms to Bill and Lisa Mollison at their home in Tasmania, Australia in April 2010.
One hour from our Seed Gardens in Byron Bay, Australia, The Permaculture Research Institute with Geoff and Nadia Lawton at the helm is leading the way with Permaculture worldwide and with the Master Plan. We recommend you check this amazing site and Permaculture organisation: www.permaculture.org.au