Patrick Whitefield (11th February 1949 – 27th February 2015) was an early pioneer of permaculture, adapting Bill Mollison’s teachings with a strong Southern Hemisphere bias to a cooler, maritime climate such as the British Isles. He wrote a number of seminal books, Permaculture in a Nutshell (1993), How to Make a Forest Garden (1996), a new edition of Tipi Living (2000), The Living Landscape (2009), How To Read the Landscape (2014) and his magnum opus, The Earth Care Manual (2004), an authoritative resource on practical, tested, cool temperate permaculture.
Patrick was born in Devizes, Wiltshire and brought up on a smallholding in Somerset. He qualified in agriculture at Shuttleworth College, Bedfordshire and after several years working in agriculture in the Middle East and Africa, he settled in central Somerset.
Patrick has appeared in several BBC TV programmes, made popular YouTube videos and was a consulting editor of Permaculture magazine since its launch in 1992. Patrick taught many permaculture and other practical courses with his wife, Cathy, and was one of the first teachers in the world to develop an online Permaculture Design Course.
After Patrick’s death, there were obituaries in The Telegraph, The Guardian and on BBC Radio 4, and tributes to him from all over the world on social media. Patrick Holden from The Sustainable Food Trust wrote, “It is only towards the end of his life that the wider significance of perma-culture ideas began to emerge… the true significance of Whitefield’s ideas was not adequately acknowledged during his lifetime, but his influence will survive him…”
