Rosemary Morrow

Rosemary Morrow will present at IPC16, the International Permaculture Convergence coming to Thailand in November 2026, speaking on permaculture in war zones and among displaced communities. She has spent much of the past four decades teaching in exactly those places. Known to many in the movement simply as Rowe, she is an elder to several generations of permaculture teachers, and David Holmgren counts her among the diverse people who built permaculture's foundations and carried it around the world.

Morrow trained in agricultural science at Sydney University, then in rural sociology at the Sorbonne, development studies at Reading in the UK, and horticulture at TAFE. Time working in Africa convinced her that conventional agriculture had little to offer the villagers she worked alongside, and when she encountered permaculture she recognised the alternative she had been looking for. She began teaching it in the Blue Mountains in 1987 with six students. The courses were never advertised, word of mouth filled them, and they have been running ever since.

From the 1980s she carried the same teaching into countries recovering from war, working with farmers and villagers in Vietnam and Cambodia and later in Uganda, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Kurdistan and East Timor. Some of that work was carried out for Quaker Service Australia, including fishpond projects in the sand dunes of central Vietnam and disaster preparation training in the Solomon Islands. Those years in the field gave her books their unusual awareness of tropical climates and hard growing conditions.

Her Earth User's Guide to Permaculture became one of the most widely used introductions to permaculture, translated into many languages and still the first book many students are handed. The teaching guides that followed, Earth User's Guide to Teaching Permaculture and Permaculture Teaching Matters, grew from her conviction that the movement spreads through its teachers, and that teaching should itself practise the second ethic, care of people. She calls this learner care. Her most recent book, the Earth Restorer's Guide to Permaculture (2022), opens with her standing in a refugee camp of fifty thousand people, and includes a chapter written for people who hold no land at all, which she notes is a first for any permaculture book.

Morrow co-founded the Blue Mountains Permaculture Institute with Lis Bastian in 2009, and in 2019 helped found Permaculture for Refugees, a network of educators that has taught Permaculture Design Certificate courses in camps and settlements across three continents. When the team taught Rohingya refugees at Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, each participant undertook to teach others in turn, and within weeks some two and a half thousand people were practising permaculture of one kind or another. In 2021 she received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to permaculture.

She lives in Katoomba, on the unceded lands of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples, in a modest retrofitted home that appears as a case study in David Holmgren's RetroSuburbia. As she puts it: "Gardening in times of drought, pandemics or war rejects the chaos and affirms human perseverance." IPC16 will be a rare chance to hear, in person, where forty years of that conviction has led.