What draws us to the garden — even when we don't have to grow anything? Even when life is full, when grief is heavy, when we barely have a balcony to spare?

In this conversation I speak with Hannah Moloney — presenter on ABC Gardening Australia, permaculture educator and designer, climate activist, cabaret performer, author and deliberate optimist. Her new book, Why We Garden: On the Joy and Wonder of Growing Things Even When We Don't Have To, has just been released and it made my heart sing.

Hannah surveyed thousands of people about why they garden. The answer that came back from 94% of respondents? Joy. Not food security. Not saving money. Joy. That alone tells us something profound about our relationship with the living world.

We talk about:

• How Hannah came to ask the question "why do we garden?" — and what she discovered when she actually asked it of thousands of people, including Australian icons Bruce Pascoe, Tim Winton, Bob Brown, Costa Georgiadis, Claire Bowditch and Laura Tingle
• Gardening as healing — how tending a garden moves grief, rage and heartbreak through the body in ways nothing else quite can
• The language we don't yet have in English for that deep sense of knowing, belonging and safety that comes from being in relationship with place
• Why 70–75% of green space in cities is lawn — and what else it could be
• Cuba in the 1990s, guerrilla gardening in 1970s New York, and the Diggers of the 1640s — gardening as ancient and ongoing act of belonging and resistance
• Hannah's climate justice cabaret Time Rebel, her upcoming walk across Tasmania dressed as an Azure Kingfisher, and why art cracks open hearts in ways expertise alone cannot
• Her own arc from herb nursery kid who couldn't wait to leave gardening behind — to someone for whom gardening is life's central practice

Hannah's call to action is simple and radical: get your hands in the earth, your feet on the ground. This knowledge is already in you. It doesn't need to be learned — only remembered.

Find Hannah and her book:

• Why We Garden — available now at bookstores across Australia and at your local library
• ABC Gardening Australia — catch Hannah on screen and at writers festivals across the country

Watch this episode on YOUTUBE

I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

Support the show

_____

MORAG GAMBLE

Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

• Morag's Courses
• Podcast Blog
• Podcast YouTube:
• Podcast Instagram
• Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.

What is permaculture design and how can you use it in your daily life?

The permaculture design principles are at the heart of the answer to these questions, to understanding what permaculture is about, and how you can apply it to all kinds of contexts.

My guest in this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World, Wilf Richards, has spent the last three and a half years collaborating with 40 permaculture educators from across Britain and beyond to write The Power of Permaculture Principles - an honest and generous exploration of the permaculture principles. Not a revision. Not a simplification. An invitation to think more deeply about the tools we already hold.

This book shares a history of each principle, its development since being formed and an analysis of how they are being used, understood and applied.

In our conversation we explore where the principles actually came from, how the language around them has evolved (and where it still needs to), what's missing (resilience, anyone?), why the principles might best be understood as a living system — a tree still growing, still branching — and how they can help all of us, wherever we are, find our way back into right relationship with the rest of nature.

Wilf is a permaculture designer and teacher based near Durham in the UK, co-managing a cooperative smallholding since 2001, and a Senior Tutor in the British permaculture diploma system. He came to permaculture through the road protest movement of the mid-1990s — that classic arc from anger at destruction to the desire to build something better — and has been living it on the land and in the community ever since.

The Book: https://www.permanentpublications.co.uk/port/the-power-of-permaculture-principles/

Wilf's Linktree: https://linktr.ee/wilf.richards

Wilf's email: wilf.abundantearth@gmail.com

Wilf's Substack: https://wilfrichards1.substack.com/

I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

Support the show

_____

MORAG GAMBLE

Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

• Morag's Courses
• Podcast Blog
• Podcast YouTube:
• Podcast Instagram
• Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.

When supply chains wobble and prices jump, the most powerful thing we can do is reconnect locally. Tianda Williams, co founder of UForage, is helping make local food visible again, from backyard abundance to roadside stalls and small growers.

On this episode of Sense-Making in a Changing World podcast we are diving into this super practical local food solution that you can all be part of.

UForage is a free, map-based mobile app that connects local growers, makers, and foragers with consumers to share, swap, or sell fresh, local food, effectively acting as a digital "farmers market in your pocket"

In 2022, Tianda's family lost their home in the Northern Rivers area to floods. It made them realise the significance of food security, community support and sustainability, and inspired her to find a way to help others, and began creating this app to connect people with local food near them.

Uforage maps local food from backyard abundance and roadside stalls to small producers and foraging locations. We talk about how local food access is often shaped by who you happen to meet, and how a simple mapping tool like this can help communities connect, reduce waste, and strengthen resilience during disruptions like floods and supply shortages.

In this episode we explore

• How floods, shortages, and being cut off make local connection feel urgent and practical.
• What this digital mapping tool works and how you can connect - supporting sharing, swapping, selling, and mapping, without taking transaction fees.
• Food waste, hunger, and the quiet abundance already growing around us.
• Why “local first” solutions can ripple outward without needing to scale in a centralised way.

Links

UForage
UForage app
TIanda's LinkedIn

I'd love to hear from you. Text me here.

Support the show

_____

MORAG GAMBLE

Founder, Permaculture Education Institute

• Morag's Courses
• Podcast Blog
• Podcast YouTube:
• Podcast Instagram
• Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/moraggamble/

I am a possibilitarian and I believe in HumanKINDness.

In this podcast my guests and I explore How are we to live? Really live, as nature ourselves, tending the conditions where life can thrive. We ask How do we become the kind of humans this moment is asking us to be?

This podcast is one of my acts of myceliation. Each conversation is a thread in a vast network of people speaking up for life with love and care.

This podcast beams out from my hand-built solar-powered studio in the midst of a permaculture food forest in a permaculture ecovillage on Jinibara and Gubbi Gubbi country.

If this episode lights something in you, pass it to one person who needs it. That is how myceliation works.