The Permaculture Home Garden

The Permaculture Home Garden by Linda Woodrow is the book from which I stole the quote you saw on my home page.
It is the very first sentence of the book's first chapter:

"This is a book about saving the planet and living to be a hundred, while throwing very impressive dinner parties and organising other creatures to do most of the work. It is a book about a very different style of growing food."

Why would you want to grow food in a different style? Linda answers that question two paragraphs further down:

"If you follow conventional gardening systems, growing your own food is a very expensive hobby. It is a full time job, and not exactly an inspiring one..."

And later on she says:

"I don't mind physical work, but I hate drudgery. There are too many things to fit into life for anything as boring as weeding or driving a tractor back and forth, back and forth."

It was Linda who taught me to think this way: if any garden task is boring, repetitive, or otherwise not much fun, then there has to be a better way to do it, or a way to outsource the task to nature.
Do you want a beautifully landscaped, productive and organic garden, where growing food is easy and fun, rather than a full time job? A garden full of birds and butterflies, of lizards and blooms, full of food and sensory delights? If yes, then Linda's book is the answer to your prayers.
The Permaculture Home Garden focuses on growing vegetables, fruit and herbs on a garden scale, from tiny inner city backyard to market garden.
Linda has developed a gardening system, a permaculture design module, that can be scaled up or down to be used in any size garden. She gives you a recipe, and it contains both the instructions, and also the reasoning behind them.
If you are a beginner, follow the recipe exactly and it will turn out well. If you are more experienced, be inspired by it, adapt and substitute to your heart's content, and come up with your own personal recipe.
The flavour? Seductive and scrumptious!

"I also believe that the best flavours come from the most seductive garden. A garden has to be an art form to be really productive. It has to feed the eyes and ears and nose as well. It has to be a refuge, a place of reflection, creation and enchantment to produce peas that can be used to bribe children."
That late, tired dash through bedlam with a shopping trolley compares very badly with a stroll through a seductive garden, not least because you can leave your purse behind.