About Holmgren Design

From its origins as a consultancy business, Holmgren Design has evolved over the years to include education, publishing and related activities to extend and deepen the understanding and application of permaculture ethics and design principles.

Today a dedicated team at Holmgren Design is building on the pioneering vision of David Holmgren and Su Dennett to contribute to the wider recognition of permaculture as a conceptual framework within the sustainability discourse in Australia and internationally.

The people behind Holmgren Design

David Holmgren

David Holmgren is best known as the co-originator of permaculture. In 1978, he and Bill Mollison published Permaculture One, starting the global permaculture movement.

Since then, David has developed three properties, consulted and supervised on urban and rural projects, written eight more books, and presented lectures, workshops and courses in Australia and around the world. His writings over those three decades span a diversity of subjects and issues, whilst always illuminating aspects of permaculture thinking and living.

At home at Melliodora in Hepburn, Central Victoria, Dja Dja Wurrung County, David is the gardener, silviculturist and builder. Within the permaculture movement, David is respected for his commitment to presenting permaculture ideas through practical projects, and showing by personal example that a sustainable lifestyle is a realistic, attractive and powerful alternative to dependent consumerism.

As well as immersion in the practical side of permaculture, David is passionate about the philosophical and conceptual foundations for sustainability, which is the focus of his Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability (2002/2017). This book has been a significant influence on permaculture thinking and the development of Transition Initiatives around the world. His Future Scenarios work has seen him recognised as a significant thinker about the ‘Energy Descent’ future. RetroSuburbia: the downshifter’s guide to a resilient future (2018) is his 592-page manual showing how Australians can downshift and retrofit their homes, gardens and selves for resilience into an uncertain future.

David and his partner Su started Melliodora Publishing to promote both his titles and those of other authors writing on related themes.

Read more about David’s personal history here.

Su Dennett

Su Dennett is David’s partner in life and livelihood, sharing their home base Melliodora and businesses Holmgren Design and Melliodora Publishing. As well as the businesses, Su focuses her prodigious energy and passion in the kitchen and community.

Su is passionate about food and provides fantastic meals for the larger crew who live, volunteer and work on the property as well as visitors on tours and courses. She also purchases and distributes bulk food, supporting regional producers. 

Su also spends her time in community projects. She and Maureen Corbett started the transition initiative Hepburn Relocalisation Network in 2006. In 2013 she was one of two women added to Hepburn Shire Council’s Women’s Honour Role for her community work and leadership in pursuing a low impact, simple lifestyle.

Meg Ulman​

Meg works part time in the HD office doing communications and publicity, and a wide range of admin duties including being David’s PA.

Meg is a radical homemaker, unschooler, community gardener, local food advocate, keen fermenter and bicycle activist. She is one quarter of the gift-economy collective Artist as Family, who live on a quarter acre permaculture plot in Dja Dja Wurrung Country, Daylesford.

Beck Lowe

Beck Lowe manages Melliodora Publishing and has been editor and/or project manager on recent new and re-released titles. She also partners with Holmgren Design for the annual Ashram PDC, and is the lead facilitator and tutor. She is the co-author of Our Street with David and was chief text wrangler and project manager in the creation of RetroSuburbia.

Beck runs the Retrosuburbia Trainers and Facilitators Workshops but admits to being the black sheep of the retrosuburbia family, living and working on her 60-acre permaculture farm near Heathcote in central Victoria. Besides work with Holmgren Design / Melliodora Publishing, and running her farm, she teaches permaculture, and is finishing her book on animals in permaculture. becklowe.com.au

Ostii Ananda

Ostii helps guide the vision of Holmgren Design, leading the collaboration on where it should go and the best way to get there.

If Ostii was interested in using corporate terms (which he is not) his role might be something like Chief Operating Officer. Covering technology, accounting, marketing, and more, Ostii is the one who irons out the bumps.

Ostii works closely with Oliver Holmgren to keep the tech, infrastructure and systems working as they should, and coordinates digital strategies across the HD publications and websites.

In 2015, Ostii founded Flowji, offering web courses, workshops and web mentoring, to assist values-aligned enterprise and social entrepreneurs to amplify their impact and make a difference.

Ostii has an obsession with growing (and sharing) rocket and probably spends too much time thinking about the intersection of permaculture and technology, and how to create a more diverse, sustainable, and connected world.

Oliver Holmgren

Oliver Holmgren, Su and David’s son, has grown up in the permaculture life and business. He managed most of the IT and web systems for Holmgren Design for many years, and still contributes his knowledge and experience as required. In recent times he has been focused on improving the book distribution systems.

Together with Richard Telford, Oliver runs Permaculture Principles, which looks after the book retail and wholesale systems for Holmgren Design and Melliodora Publishing, as well as promoting information on permaculture in a practical and accessible way through their website. Oliver is a keen photographer, and provided many of the case study photos in RetroSuburbia.

Richard Telford

Richard has designed and laid out recent Melliodora Publishing books, and helps co-ordinate new publications. He created and maintains permacultureprinciples.com and is the publisher of the Permaculture Calendar. Back in 2000, he collaborated with David designing the permaculture principles icons. Together with Oliver Holmgren, Richard runs Permaculture Principles.

Richard writes a blog Abdallah House documenting his home at Seymour, Victoria where he lives with his partner Kunie and their two sons, Kai and Sen.

In 2021, he was awarded a Permaculture Service Award from Permaculture Australia for his contribution to the permaculture movement, in particular by increasing the global accessibility of permaculture through permacultureprinciples.com, and through his permaculture graphic design.

Fernando Moreno

Fernando Moreno

Fernando is the financial officer for Holmgren Design and marketing consultant for Permaculture Principles. He combines his MBA and business experience with permaculture knowledge, keeping the finance information flowing so the teams can make informed decisions that are not only right for them, but also for the community and for the planet.

Fernando has a passion for community building and working to understand how we can sit with our differences and live with each other. Born and raised in Colombia, he loves music, dancing and tropical fruits. He also has a passion for home-brewing beers and fermented beverages, and enjoys sharing and drinking them with friends.

Kathryn Hall

Kathryn’s food growing prowess cannot be compared to that of her esteemed colleagues, but she is very good at building stuff and problem solving, especially websites and other tech type systems. Her graphic design and web crafting skills combine nicely with Meg and Ostii’s skills and together they manage to communicate a great deal of permaculture information.

While her veggie patch might be void of actual veggies, her life is filled with smelly teens, music and dancing, creative endeavours and working with Ostii on Flowji projects. She loves community, collaboration and conversation, has a passion for supporting youth leadership and gender equity and quietly enjoys a good game of football (the round ball variety).

She is actually very good at growing indoor plants!

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Cathy Inpotong

Cathy was born in a little village in the centre of Thailand. Since she was little, she has always been surrounded by greenery, thus her love for nature. This relationship plays a big role in her working experience with Holmgren, making it one of her favourite things to do.

She was introduced to the Holmgren team by Ostii Ananda, founder of Flowji, and is currently working as a virtual assistant for both Holmgren Design and Flowji.
Cathy oversees the content updates on Holmgren Design and RestroSuburbia websites, which has led to her interest in permaculture. Gardening has become one of her more passionate hobbies and nowadays she is obsessed with growing her own fruit and vegetables at home.

Venie Holmgren

(15-9-1922 – 27-1-2016)

Venie Holmgren was born in the little village of York, in Western Australia. She produced five collections of poetry, a poetry CD with music and a travel memoir.

She was a veteran environmental and peace activist over more decades than most of us have been alive.

She has performed her work in pubs, cafés, prisons and at peace and environmental rallies and festivals. She performed abroad in Germany, India, Canada and the U.S. and was visiting poet at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. in 1998.

Her poetry was informed by a wide range of experience including 15 years of self reliant living in the passive solar house and permaculture garden documented in Permaculture In The Bush and her move to Melliodora.

Her final collection of poetry is The Tea House Poems so called because it was written during her stay at the tea house in Melliodora. Available via print on demand.

A sense of direction, a book about her time on the road in the late 1970′s includes her time spent with David just after the publication of Permaculture One.

Poets of the Bega Valley includes her readings and interviews with Tim Metcalf.

David and Su established the Venie Holmgren Environmental Poetry Prize to honour Venie, which has been held annually since 2016.  

A local community group in Djaara country, Central Victoria Australia, that David and his partner Su Dennett are involved with. HRN runs activities and events to stimulate greater individual, household and community level self reliance and non monetary economy to survive and thrive challenging times and build a better future.

A website that provides easy access to the permaculture ethics and design principles developed by David Holmgren, with clean graphics, simple explanations and beautiful photos from past years of  the Permaculture Principles calendar.

A short book by David Holmgren, published on-line in 2008, that maps the potential interaction between peak oil and climate change using a scenario planning model that has continued to influence permaculture and kindred networks around the world, and inform David’s.

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