For permaculture to continue to grow it is vital that we have a vibrant, diverse, extensive and engaging demonstration network of permaculture places. We need thousands of people touching, tasting, seeing, hearing and smelling what permaculture design is like in actuality.
Since 2008 the LAND Network has grown into a vibrant network of permaculture sites including suburban gardens, smallholdings, rural farms, city farms, forest gardens, and amazing allotments. LAND stands for Learning And Network Demonstration. They are all set up to show permaculture in practice to visitors and volunteers in a safe, accessible and inspiring way. The rapid development of the Network in England has been made possible because of the financial support from the Local Food Fund.
So far over 30,000 people have visited the LAND Centres in England to learn more about what permaculture means and how we can live lightly on the earth whilst caring for humanity in a fair way. The network is expanding further, with national networks emerging in Wales (“Tir Dysgu”), in ScotLAND and with active interest from other parts of Europe.
LAND Centre's are like the 'shop front' of permaculture: where we can 'show off' permaculture design to people interested in learning more. To ensure they are of a good quality we have visited everyone to assess them according to our criteria. Each assessment is considered by the LAND Advisory Group. To help ensure LAND Centres are continuing to be excellent public demonstrations of permaculture we are introducing biennial checks. Mostly this is a peer-review process but will also be informed by the forthcoming comment function on the individual Centre pages.