June Permie Corner

By Lorraine Sharaf

“Vision is not seeing things as they are, but as they will be.” — proverb

Change happens every moment, every day, to everything on Earth — and, from what astronomers tell us, everywhere in the universe.

Sometimes we celebrate these changes. Sometimes we curse them. And sometimes we simply say, Uh oh — now what?

How we respond matters, not just for our own peace of mind, but for the health of our gardens and the landscapes we share with countless other species. The trouble is that humans tend to make adversity personal. We can become so focused on what we have lost, or what has gone wrong, that we lose sight of the larger pattern.

Principle 12, Creatively Use and Respond to Change, is the final principle — or thinking tool — in David Holmgren’s permaculture framework. It instructs us to reframe our reaction to disruption: to see change not only as loss or inconvenience, but also as information. Sometimes change is an ending. Sometimes it is an opening. Often, it is both.

Of course, change is not always loss. Sometimes it comes as abundance: a garden bed that flourishes beyond its borders, a young tree that finally creates shade, a farmers’ market that grows because the community is showing up, or a local food movement that gains momentum. These are good changes, but they still require a thoughtful response. 

Success, too, must be tended.

🦋 Butterfly: A Symbol of Change

Principle 12 is often symbolized by a butterfly.

A butterfly is not simply a prettier caterpillar. It is a fully transformed animal. It begins life as a leaf-eating caterpillar — an important food source for baby birds — and then metamorphoses into a nectar-drinking pollinator. In each stage, it plays a different role in the ecosystem.

Gardens do this too. A sunny patch becomes shaded as trees mature. A wet spot becomes a bog garden or a location for a willow tree. A fallen log becomes a habitat. A struggling lawn becomes a meadow. A former problem becomes part of the design.

🌱 Two Kinds of Change: The Expected and the Unexpected

Holmgren describes Principle 12 as having two distinct threads.

The first thread is about working creatively with predictable change — deliberately designing to make use of it rather than simply enduring it. If you understand how an ecosystem develops from bare earth to mature woodland, or from lawn to meadow, you can introduce the right species and support systems at the right time to create a food forest or edible ecosystem that matches both your land and your needs. Planning for the seasons, rehabilitating damaged land to mimic a natural forest system, or preparing for predictable weather events like hurricane season in the Carolinas are all examples of this thread.

The second thread is about responding creatively to unexpected and often unwanted change: the death of a cherished shade tree that sheltered ramps, pawpaws, currants, and woodland mushrooms growing beneath it; an invasion of a new pest or plant; or a catastrophic weather event such as floods, droughts, and late freezes. Here, the design skill is not anticipation but adaptability — the capacity to meet what you didn’t see coming with creativity rather than only grief or panic.

In Holmgren’s own words, these two threads are: “designing to make use of change in a deliberate and co-operative way” and “creatively responding or adapting to large-scale system change which is beyond our control or influence.” 

In plain language: work creatively with change you can see coming and respond creatively when change arrives unexpectedly. 

🐝 Working with Natural Succession

Holmgren considers ecological succession one of the most important expressions of Principle 12 in permaculture practice. Once you understand why, it’s hard not to notice it everywhere.

Nature is always moving. Leave bare soil alone and it does not remain bare for long. First come fast-growing pioneer plants. Then grasses and perennials. Then shrubs. Then young trees. Over time, if conditions allow, the system becomes more layered, more complex, and more self-sustaining.

Permaculture works by gently accelerating or guiding that process. A well-designed food forest, for example, doesn’t fight succession — it embraces it. In the early years, the system is open and sunny, productive with annuals and soft fruits. As the canopy closes, light-loving pioneers give way to shade-tolerant understory plants. A designer who hasn’t anticipated this will find themselves with a shady thicket where their strawberries used to be. A designer who understands these patterns will find themselves with mulberries, hazelnuts, and a largely self-managing understory.

But understanding succession is not only a planning tool. It is also a way of reading the current situation. A weedy patch may be telling us the soil is compacted, disturbed, or exposed. A mossy area is telling us the site is shaded and moist. A plant that keeps failing may be telling us it is in the wrong place. A plant that self-seeds happily is telling us it belongs there.

Common local examples of compacted soil: 

• Dandelions grow in compacted soil that is low in calcium. They have deep taproots that can break up compacted soil, and their presence often indicates that the soil is not holding water and nutrients effectively. I like dandelions, but for those who don’t, addressing problems with the soil is a much healthier and longer-term solution to using herbicides or laboriously digging them out by hand.
• Plantains indicate compacted and neglected soils with poor drainage.

🌿 First Thread: Designing for Resilience, Not Rigidity

A rigid system depends on everything staying the same. A resilient system expects change.

In a garden, resilience might look like planting a diversity of species instead of relying on one crop — mixing annuals with perennials, deep-rooted plants with shallow-rooted ones, early bloomers with late bloomers, moisture-lovers with drought-tolerant ones. It also means building relationships among elements. A plant guild is not just a collection of plants; it is a small community where one plant attracts pollinators, another fixes nitrogen, another covers the soil, another draws up minerals, and another offers food or habitat. The strength of a garden is not measured only by how many species it contains, but by how many beneficial connections it cultivates.

The same is true of our foodshed. A resilient local food system needs farmers, consumers, markets, seed growers, composters, educators, volunteers, donors, landowners, policymakers, and neighbors. When disruption comes — and it will — the relationships among those people matter as much as anything growing in the ground.

Of course, change is not always a loss. Sometimes it comes as abundance: a garden bed that flourishes beyond its borders, a young tree that finally creates shade, a farmers’ market that grows because the community is showing up, or a local food movement that gains momentum. These are good changes, but they still require a thoughtful response. Success also needs tending. 

🌸 Second Thread: When Change Is Beyond Our Control

Farmers in Pennsylvania know to plan for freeze-thaw cycles and summer dry spells — that kind of change is built into the rhythm of the growing season. But this spring delivered something far worse than expected.

After April’s early warmth pushed fruit trees into bloom, hard freezes swept through Bucks County and a wider 13-state region. Perennial crops suffered catastrophic losses, and many fruit growers lost most — or even all — of their tree fruit crops. Berry and grape growers were not spared either.

When a perennial crop is damaged, growers can’t simply replant and harvest a few weeks later. A lost apple, peach, cherry, grape, or berry crop may mean the loss of an entire season’s income from plants that took years to establish.

We don’t yet know how all of this will be resolved. What we do know is that it will take far more than individual resilience to see these farmers through — it will take community commitment and outside resources, alongside the creativity, knowledge, and tenacity that our local farmers already have in abundance. In permaculture design, community integration is not a nice addition to good design. It is part of the design.

How can we help? We can support local growers by continuing to shop at farmers markets, buying what these farmers do have available, and advocating for public support. And if you see a sparse fruit table at the market this summer, don’t assume poor planning — sometimes a farmer did everything right and the weather still won.

🌳 When Loss Creates a New Opening

Several years ago, we lost a mature sugar maple during severe winds. It was ripped up by its roots and thrown over our fence. We were shocked and sad. Mature trees and what they offer as shade, beauty, habitat, and atmosphere is not easily replaced.

We weren’t the only ones. Huge trees and branches came down all over Doylestown and the greater area, falling across roads, into neighbors’ yards, onto power lines and cars, on gravestones in the cemeteries, and crushing at least one house. Many, many people had to accept a new landscape.

But, after our maple was removed, I noticed something lovely: bright sunlight at the edge of my existing vegetable garden. On our one-third-acre property, very few areas receive six or more hours of direct sun. Losing that tree created one of the best growing spots I have.

That did not erase the loss, but it changed the question and our response. Instead of only asking How do we replace what was here? we could ask What is this place becoming now?

Taking a moment to think matters. When something changes in a garden, often our first impulse is to fix it quickly by replacing the dead tree to fill the gap and try to restore what was there before. This is where Principle 1 — observe and interact — comes back around. Before acting, observe. What has changed about the light, the water, the wind, the soil? Is this an opportunity to try something new? What does this place want to become next?

🌱 A Steward’s Perspective

Principle 12 is a fitting place to end this Permie Corner series because it contains all the others.

To creatively respond to change, we have to observe and interact. We have to catch and store energy. We have to value diversity, use edges, produce no waste, integrate rather than segregate, and choose small, slow solutions and learn patience.

It is tempting to think of a permaculture design as something we finish: a map, a plan, a planted bed, a completed project. But living systems are never finished. They mature, surprise us, disappoint us, recover, and transform.

So do communities.

So do we.

The work of stewardship is not to freeze a place in time. It is to stay in a relationship with it.

🧭 June’s Permaculture Tip

June garden activities that integrate Principle 12:

• Find one area of your garden that is in active succession. What stage has it reached, and what is likely next? Is there a way to work with that natural progression rather than against it?
• Consider one aspect of your system that will need to change significantly in the next decade — whether due to tree growth, climate shifts, your own changing capacity, or something else. Begin designing for that future now, even in a small way.
• The next time something fails or is lost, give yourself 48 hours before responding. During that time, simply observe and ask: what has this opened up?

You may discover a better place for vegetables, a new pollinator patch, a path that makes more sense, a shaded sitting area, a rain garden, or a small habitat corner. The best design may happen after the original plan falls apart.

🌾 Closing Reflection

Principle 12 doesn’t ask us to pretend change is no big deal. Some changes are exciting. Some are inconvenient. Some are heartbreaking. All require adjusting to new circumstances. A lost tree, a failed crop, a damaged farm season, and a changing climate can bring real grief and real consequences.

Permaculture design provides us a comprehensive set of tools and thoughtful solutions that offers grounded hope and a way to move forward. It reminds us that living systems are adaptive. Soil can rebuild. Seeds can wait. Communities can reorganize. New relationships can form. Edges can become fertile. Loss can reveal openings we could not see before.

Thank you for spending a year with these ideas and the land we share.

See you in July, when I’ll bring all twelve principles together — and explore how they work as one.