Permaculture Magazine NL Illustrations

Permacultuur (Dutch for “Permaculture“) Magazine launched in January 2015 with the goal of sharing permaculture knowledge to work towards a resilient future. Five years later, they are still going strong, releasing 4 issues per year - one for every season. Although the magazine itself is published in Dutch, you can check out their website translated to English here.

When they were still starting up, in 2016, my sister and I were asked to contribute to the “Kids pages“ of the magazine, as we were relatively young and had completed our Permaculture Design Course not long before. Being in love with my watercolours, I did some illustrations for their second and third issues.

The top two images are, respectively, a top-down view and dissection view of a permaculture “herb spiral“ with a water collection pond at the bottom. The idea behind such a spiral is to plant herbs that need the least amount of water at the top and herbs that need the most water at the bottom. The water will flow down due to gravity, and excess will collect in the pond to be used later. As an added bonus, these spirals look very beautiful!

The third image represents the layers of a food forest. Food forests aim to optimise space by utilising many vertical niches for plants of varying heights. These plants will all serve different complementary purposes and, thus, help each other out. For example, lower down plants may serve as “cover crops“, preventing rainwater from evaporating back out of the soil, whereas taller trees have deeper roots that can pull up nutrients from deeper down in the soil. The plants also provide habitats for many different animal species.

The fourth image is a collection of animals that can frequently be found around gardens that represent different levels of the food web. These animals not only interact with one another, but also with the plants. For instance, bees, butterflies, mice and birds are a few prime examples of pollinators, which are necessary for flowering plants to reproduce. In addition, when smaller critters get eaten by larger ones, the dead remains of the dead animal and the feces of the living animal all help to fertilize the soil and provide nutrients to the plants.

The last image is a collection of seeds and beans, all of which can be planted to produce new plants. The image includes a speckled kidney bean, black bean, pumpkin seed, sunflower seed and chickpea.