Garden Design
Keyline design principles
Twenty-first century land useThe power and essential design of keyline is in the topography itself as inherent in the very nature of ridges, valleys and streams. The discovery of and sensitivity to what Nature has already built should be the first design consideration whether laying out a small farm or building a city. Let's look at what topography and the Earth's contours can do for permaculture, sustainability, flood control and other aspects of planetary life.
In 1954, a mining engineer named P. A. Yeomans dispelled the myth that it takes 1, 000 years to produce an inch of topsoil with a revolutionary set of methods he called The Keyline Plan. His book and farm demonstrations became a primary influence for the permaculture movement in the late Twentieth century. Now, in the Twenty-first Century, sustainable agriculture is no longer an optional novelty, but a crucial paradigm for survival. The application of a simple set of holistically implied rules can help countries and communities shift back from reckless consumerism to productive stewardship of the land and water systems we all depend upon.
The Keyline Plan by Percival Alfred Yeomans
Watershed and Commonwealth
When God showers us from Heaven with the blessing of rainfall, He is providing the flow of Life's most universal ingredient, water. Unfortunately, we just use it to wash the filth from our concrete substrates, fill up our drainage ditches, water our chemically tainted crops and send toxic wastes on out to sea. In his essay, Watershed and Commonwealth Wendell Berry reformulates the golden rule to read "Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you." Keyline design principles are an elemental way to think about what to do with our part and interaction with the water cycle. Though agricultural technology is involved, it is not the power behind the process, nor is it the solution or source of the design. The power and essential design of keyline is the topography itself as inherent in the very nature of ridges, valleys and streams.Dotted lines ...
Keyline design is built upon a singular point in a ridge-valley system called by Yeomans, the keypoint. This is the succinct point in the topology with the most hydrological energy during a downpour and is generally the spot where a stream first forms. The keyline is a line drawn along every point at that elevation in the ridge-valley topography. The idea is to keep falling water as far uphill as possible, capturing its energy and nourishment over the largest possible area. The identification of the keypoint and its associated keyline is the first step in understanding how to get the most benefit from natural rainfall and in minimizing disruptive environmental impact of the built environment. A myriad of problems downstream can be solved by understanding the dynamics of the hydrological properties upstream.GEOGRAPHICAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL BASIS OF KEYLINE
by the late Prof J. MacDonald-Holmes, Dean of the Faculty Geography, University of Sydney.
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| Lines mean much more if they follow nature's way of doing things. (We should work with these when determining boundaries, building roads and buildings and even when plowing our fields.) |
Percival Yeomans was an Austrailian from New South Wales where rainfall is sparse and soil depth is minimal. Wendell Berry and I are Americans from Kentucky where rainfall is bountiful and the soil depth is phenomenal. Agricultural policy here in the U.S. is pathetically clamped to nonsensical commercial interests based purely on cash flow. Australia seems to be at least aware of its need to make the most of its land and water. The U.S. on the other hand has proven and demonstrated a blatant disregard for land and water as evidenced by the "hypoxic zone" in the Gulf of Mexico at the base of the Mississippi River. A broad understanding of watershed health, as the basis of a national policy, should form. The realization that all places are interconnected via the system of mountains, valleys and rivers, should allow some strategies for improvement to come about. What if the entire watershed system from the Appalachians to the Rockies were thought of as one system ?
Google maps, GPS, GIS and keyline design
Americans from the Central US are quite familiar with the Army Corps of Engineers and its massive effort to somehow control flooding and harness the hydrological power of the river system. Back in the 40s and 50s, surveying and engineering on dams had to be massive to be considered worthwhile. The Tennessee Valley Authority projects, for example, are quite impressive in scale and may appear to be beneficial in some ways: Floods are slowed, electricity is generated, recreational lakes are formed, and so forth. But many of the dams have proven to be problematic, ineffective and even disastrous. Smaller scaled Keyline dams make much more sense upstream for minimizing flooding in the Mississippi River tributary system or even to turn millworks or generators. Keyline cultivation (also called micro-terracing) uses the rainfall to build soil up on the ridges before it is lost as unneeded runoff and flood water downstream in New Orleans.Now that we have the GPS (Global Positioning System) on hand-held devices and a broad range of GIS (Geographic Information Systems), the "big picture" is easier to see. Public Internet services like Google maps have emerged and government services such as the USGS are more accessible. As these services grow into practical implementation, individuals and groups will be able to examine places of interest to see how they fit into the local ridge-valley and watershed systems. Community scale design for the local built environment can now be "keylined" using customized topographical maps to look at the lay of the land in a holistic way. Keyline-aware design and development by nature has to be done at something like a "village scale" and may best be accomplished as a "grassroots" effort. We can look back at the community-based mill works of New England and overlay today's technology onto that social fabric.
To see a working example of keyline design applied to a family farm, copy and paste the coordinates,
37 9 32.95 S, 144 15 8.09 E ...into the google maps searchbox. This is an organic farm owned by another Australian, David Holmgren who is a major proponent of practical permaculture and was inspired by P. A. Yeomans and his keyline design principles. Notice the three small reservoirs formed by keyline dams and that the roads connect keypoints in a graceful and logical way. This spread is a co-design with a whole new aesthetic that demonstrates actual sustainability on the slopes near Melbourne.
Keyline Cultivation and Soil Health
Yeomans extended his keypoint and keyline methods beyond topographic planning to a general methodology for soil-building. His alternative to inversion tillage with the conventional moldboard plows of those days was to use a modified chisel plow that ripped deeply into the subsoil. This method substantially increased the soil's ability to store rainfall while preserving a much larger portion of the organic matter on top. The effect was a measurable increase in the depth of the working layer of topsoil and the creation of what is essentially a reservoir for air, nutrients and water below in the subsoil. Yeomans and his sons developed what they called a "keyline plow" and that development continues to our day, especially in Australia. In America, this tillage paradigm is virtually unknown, but as awareness of the value of organic farming and permaculture increases, new tillage systems could emerge. |
| Keyline irrigation channel at Orana Farm near Victora Photo by April Samson-Kelly |
Think Globally, Act Locally
Can I get personal here? The original phrase "Think Global, Act Local" first appears in the book "Cities in Evolution" (1915) by Scots town planner and social activist Patrick Geddes. In Australia and Tasmania, Yeomans, Mollison and Holmgren have no choice but to consider the harsh reality of the landscapes they inherit and inhabit. For them, permaculture was a natural discovery and in their country became a somewhat nationally accepted paradigm - maybe even a norm. In the US (where I live) we have fertile soils, adequate rainfall (most of the time but sometimes too much) and a technologically advanced system of industrialized agriculture. We have sprawling overdeveloped cities and tiny ghost town shells left over from industrial boom days of various types. Terms like "sustainable agriculture" and "ecosystem" are not yet in everyday use in the mainstream of public discourse. In fact, there is little attention to anything at all that is not on prime-time television. Here however, we do at least have people like Wendell Berry, Joel Salatin and Michael Pollan who are raising some consciousness and have developed an active and conscious following. It's great that a few American farms and some cities enjoy such economic success, but at what cost to the rest of us?I've lived all up and down the Mississippi River from St Louis to New Orleans. I was raised near the confluence of the Ohio river with the Mississippi. In my short lifetime I've seen lush thick timber lands raped and pillaged from the Barlow Bottoms to feed the paper mill at Wickliffe. Much forest land was clear-cut, burned, bulldozed and blasted, then transformed into crop land. The creeks where I could dive in over my head as a child are now filled with silt and raw sewage. The City of Cairo can't even call itself a city any more. The local economy is depressed and sometimes I am too.
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| The Ohio/Mississippi confluence: Look at the difference in the color of the two streams. What a mess! |
But I am hopeful. This new technology may have some answers. Please join me and tune your map to
GPS: 37.13654, -89.02704
That's where Miss Emma's store used to be at Oscar, Kentucky. (btw, Miss Emma's store was in a Hollywood movie!) We can use google maps to view the landscape, the lightly rolling plains and fields and creeks. See Smokey Road? Can you believe the lengths they went through to make that road follow an imaginary dotted line? Why didn't they just follow the ridge? See Clanton Creek over there? That's my creek!
With satellite and high altitude imagery, we can spot problems from above, even though we can't afford a helicopter. We can change over to the terrain view to see topographical features and read elevations. We can even follow creeks and tributaries up to their headwaters which are many times illegitimate gullies in plowed fields that could have been prevented with simple keyline dams and contour plowing. It is possible that we can approach the farmer or landowner with a modest proposal to do some surveying and civil engineering on their property.
A Modest Proposal
Now it's your turn. If you live in a place on this particular planet at this time, surface hydrology effects you. Use the comment section below to let us know where you are and what problems your watershed is experiencing. Do you live on a river or creek or do you have a drainage ditch in your yard? Does it rain where you live? Are you a farmer or a city dweller? It really doesn't matter. Keyline design principles may apply to your built environment. Do you have a GPS-enabled handheld device? Would you like to be a Bioneer? We can do this!
Does anyone know of a good home and garden design software? ask?
I use sweethome 3d but it's only okay, I was wondering if anyone knew of a good free download for some home design software... Sweethome 3d does not do landscape design, I would like one that does both, but I don't really want to pay for it.
Get the answers...
I'm looking to study Garden design and landscape in Paris.?
I'm searching on universities or schools to teach me Garden design and Landscape courses in paris, though could not find any. Would anyone know of such teaching institutions?
Thank you.
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Garden design
30 Jul 2008 at 8:48am
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