Heather Jo Flores

About me

Permaculture Women's Guild offers free and low-cost online permaculture courses for people of all levels of expertise. visit www.permaculturewomen.com for a full rundown of our programs, our faculty, and the resources we provide.

About PWG's founder and curriculum designer:

In 1999, Heather Jo Flores founded the original chapter of Food Not Lawns, a community of avant-gardeners dedicated to sharing surplus food, seeds and resources towards a more sustainable future, and got her PDC when she organized and attended a city-funded permaculture design course for twenty neighbors in Eugene, Oregon, taught by Toby Hemenway and Jude Hobbs.

Heather attended Jude Hobbs' permaculture teacher training in 2002, and received her BA degree in Interdisciplinary Studies, focused on the pedagogy of permaculture, and how to organize communities around the idea of ecological sustainability. Later, her MFA degree incorporated this pedagogy toward understanding how to use permaculture in practice to help people overcome trauma and develop healthy interpersonal relationships.

In 2006, Chelsea Green published her book "Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Gardens and Your Neighborhood into a Community," and from there, the global FNL movement blossomed. Heather has toured all over the USA, hosting community seed swaps and lawns-to-gardens work party events, and manages a diverse online network of activist gardeners.

In 2017, seeing a clear need for an ecofeminist approach to permaculture education, she founded Permaculture Women's Guild and tapped 40 of the world's most brilliant permaculture teachers to collaborate on a double-certificate, low-cost online design course.

Meanwhile, from 1999 through now, Heather is knee-deep in hands-on organic agriculture, specializing in food forest design and installation, with special emphasis on seed stewardship. Her portfolio ranges from a 33-acre mixed-use working organic farm/permaculture education center boasting almost a thousand fruit trees and a 500-species botanical sanctuary in Oregon, to a tightly-designed, acequia-watered Mediterranean polyculture in Andalucia, and many zones between. As a "vagabond farmer," Heather has had the distinct experience of cycling through a dozen ongoing sites, interacting in the ongoing designs, changes, mistakes, and improvements, and then applying the evolution of this learning to her writing and to her curricula.

In addition to writing, teaching, and organizing about land-based permaculture, Heather is also fascinated with how permaculture tools and techniques can be applied to the design of the inner landscape and/or invisible structures, and has dedicated much of her written and educator work to this topic. In addition to the full-scale certification courses, she offers a range of permaculture-based courses (some are FREE!)

Learn more at www.heatherjoflores.com and www.permaculturewomen.com

Educator qualifications

1999-present: working farmer/seed saver/researcher/writer
2001 PDC Cascadia Permaculture, Jude Hobbs & Toby Hemenway
2002 Permaculture Teacher Training, Jude Hobbs
2004 Bachelor of Arts degree, Permaculture Pedagogy
2006 Book published: Food Not Lawns
2006-2015 Touring, teaching, co-teaching PDC's around USA
2016 MFA Interdisciplinary Arts degree, using permaculture combined with creative expression to heal emotional trauma.
2017-present: Founding director, Permaculture Women's Guild
2019-preset: Lead teacher, yearlong course: Design Your Permaculture Paradise