Five Season Medicinal Plant and Food Garden Tour

Please join us for a conversation in our developing Five Seasons Garden. The garden is designed to offer food and herbal medicines that support our changing health needs in each season. It is also being built as a teaching garden and uses color patterns to help us visually connect the healing qualities of plants with our seasonal well-being.
The garden prioritizes native medicinal plants, while also drawing inspiration from distant and long-established healing traditions. It highlights the properties of herbs, vegetables, and grains, and includes exceptionally nutritious wild plants that can be found around us.
The sunny hillside garden demonstrates many permaculture water management techniques, including berms and swales that provide plants a variety of soil moisture environments and maximizes water capture across the site. The berms demonstrate a variety of dry-laid, site-gathered stone and log construction techniques, along with simple gravity mounds reinforced with plants.
Adjacent to the Five Seasons Garden is a young and developing Orchard and Food Forest, a passive solar office/classroom, and a solar electric system that powers pumps, lighting, hot water and other electric needs. Our long-term goal is to support practitioners and educators with artful gardens and plant communities that foster health and well-being. This goal is driven by the hope that we can together make the plant world more accessible and understandable to larger groups of people.
John and Anne live in Kerhonkson and design and build gardens and landscapes through their business, Design by Plants. They both hold Permaculture Design Certificates. John taught site planning at CUNY for many years and was an architect before beginning the garden business. Anne is an ecological landscape designer, herbal educator, and ethnobotanist.
Please wear rainboots or over the ankle boots. Parts of the site can be wet, and poison ivy will occasionally appear.