Zones in permaculture

What zones are for

Every garden has a centre: the door you step out of in the morning, the path you walk without thinking. Zones start from that point. They sort a site by how often a person goes to each part of it and how much care each element needs. What wants daily attention goes close to the centre; what can look after itself for weeks or years goes further out. The tool deals with a scarce resource that plans often forget: human attention, and the walking it costs.

Bill Mollison described zones in Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), together with sectors and slope; in Introduction to Permaculture (1991) he grouped the three under efficient energy planning. The reasoning is plain. A bed of salad fifty steps from the kitchen is watered less often, picked later and weeded too late, however good its soil. The same bed beside the door is seen a dozen times a day, almost in passing. Good placement turns care into a habit rather than a chore.

Zones are planned from the inside out. The designer begins with the centre and the paths that already exist, decides what has to be near, and only then fills the outer areas. In his twelve principles of 2002, David Holmgren discusses zones as an example of designing from patterns to details: the large pattern comes first, the choice of plants afterwards.

The zones one by one

The count runs from 0 to 5. In Mollison's original scheme the house belonged to zone 1; according to the permaculture writer Toby Hemenway, some permaculturists in the United States and Britain began counting it as zone 0 in the late 1980s.

• Zone 0: the house. The centre of daily life, where water, heat and waste begin their paths. Where a house is still to be built, it is the first design question; otherwise it is the fixed point everything else refers to.
• Zone 1: herbs and kitchen garden. The area right outside the door, visited several times a day. Herbs, salads, seedlings, a herb spiral, the kitchen compost bin, a rain tank and the tools most often used. Everything here is picked, watered or checked on the way past.
• Zone 2: fruit, small animals, compost. Visited daily or every few days. Berry bushes and fruit trees that need pruning, hens, bees, the main compost heaps, perennial vegetables and the inner part of a food forest.
• Zone 3: orchard, pasture, main crops. Visited perhaps once a week once plantings are established. Larger orchards, staple crops, pasture and fodder trees, water stored for the land.
• Zone 4: half wild. Managed lightly and seldom: timber and firewood, fodder, coppice, wild fruit, herbs and mushrooms gathered in season, occasional grazing.
• Zone 5: wild. Land left to itself. People come here to observe and learn, not to manage. What grows here without help shows which plant communities the place can carry, which makes zone 5 the teacher of the other zones.

A small town garden may hold only zones 0 to 2 and a wild corner. A farm may have all six, some of them more than once.

Not rings: zones on real ground

Textbooks draw zones as neat rings around the house; on real land they almost never look like that. Their shape follows the paths people actually take, the form of the ground and the movement of water. A bed along the daily path to the well can be zone 1 even though it lies far from the door, because it is passed every day. A steep, hot corner next to the house may stay zone 4 because nobody wants to climb there. Zones become tongues, wedges and islands, and they can overlap. A season of noting where you really walk tells more than any diagram.

Zones handle the energy that comes from inside the system, above all people. Sectors map the energies that arrive from outside: the path of the sun in summer and winter, prevailing and storm winds, the direction from which fire is likely to come, the flow of surface water, cold air, noise, and views worth keeping or screening. The two tools are drawn on the same plan. A windbreak belongs where the wind sector crosses zone 2 or 3. In the fire sector, moist green plantings and open ground in front of the house act as a buffer.

Slope is the third layer. Water and cold air run downhill, warm air rises. A tank above the beds supplies them by gravity, and plants that dislike cold stay out of the low pockets where cold air settles.

Common mistakes

• Compost too far away. Kitchen scraps arise every day. If the walk to the heap is long and muddy, they end up in the bin. A small bin in zone 1 and the main heaps at the edge of zone 2 solve this.
• Vegetables in zone 3. Annual vegetables need water, picking and an eye on snails almost daily. Planted far out, they suffer quickly. Zone 3 suits trees, perennial crops and pasture that can manage between visits.
• Forgetting zone 5. When every corner is put to use, the place loses its measure: the wild part that shows what the land does on its own. Even a small garden can leave a corner alone.

Further in the TerraWiki

• Zone 1: the herb spiral fits many herbs and small climates beside the door.
• Zones 1 and 2: compost only works if the way to it is short; a roof cistern and greywater bring water from the house to the nearest beds.
• Zones 2 and 3: a plant guild gathers the companions of a fruit tree, and a food forest layers many guilds into a woodland.
• Zones 3 and 4: silvopasture joins trees and grazing animals, and keyline design plans the water of the whole slope.
• Zone 5: the macchia often forms the wild part of dry Mediterranean slopes.
• Behind the zones: Mollison's design principles, observe and interact and integrate rather than segregate.

Zones at Sa Medada

Sa Medada is a slope in Jerzu, in Ogliastra on the east side of Sardinia, with mild winters and a dry season that lasts roughly from May to September. Read with the zone tool in mind, the land already suggests some outlines. The macchia on the steeper slopes is the natural candidate for zone 5, the part that would be left to itself and shows how the shrubland holds the ground. The old olive grove would fit the calmer, outer zones. The LiDAR wetness map shows a comparatively dry main area and moister channels along the edges, so the thirstiest plantings would be placed with that map in hand. In a summer-dry landscape, fire is a sector that any plan has to take seriously.

Project Eden begins with pioneer plants, ground cover and holding water. Swales are planned; none has been built yet. A zone plan would help decide where each of these steps comes first.