From Edible Landscapes to an APW crowdfunding campaign

This time last year Resilio Studio director Gary Marshall was busy preparing for his contribution to the 2025 NZILA Firth Wānanga held in Heretaunga Hastings in May with the intent of giving a lift to the increasingly timely theme of Horanuku Hora Kai | Edible Landscapes.

As part of a panel addressing design thinking, Gary spoke about our extremely complex food system being tightly strung with strong interdependencies.

While raising the flag there would be widespread hardship if food security was to be disrupted in any significant way, he also made the observation that the world still mainly feeds itself through alternatives to our existing industrial system.

Fin Mackesy and Gary Marshall

Not one to sit idly by, this year Gary has been doing his best to accelerate the prescient path that he started on some 18 years ago when he and Finn Mackesy paired up to found the Aotearoa Permaculture Workshop (APW), followed by Resilio Studio in 2015 and Dark Green Aotearoa in 2019.

This 'acceleration' is taking the form of a crowdfunding campaign on Chuffed. The campaign was officially launched at the Aotearoa National Permaculture Hui this month, with a $50,000 target needing to be reached by 11 May.

This will enable APW to resource a consolidated new APW Foundation Programme capable of translating over a decade of on‑the‑ground teaching and more than 20 years of professional practice into a format that is accessible, flexible, and scalable.

Permaculture is a design approach to sustainable living modelled on natural living systems integrating human settlements and natural environments... It's about designing systems that meet all the needs of humans and the natural world - without compromising ecological health.

APW is a grassroots education organisation that supports people to navigate ecological, social and economic change through place‑based learning that is intentionally 'off the grid' of conventional curricula. Its seed funding is from Resilio Studio and regenerative project management company Done.

Initially APW delivered a bioregional modular permaculture design certificate covering areas of ecological design, social innovation, appropriate technology and resilience that has had over 200 people ‘graduate’ and well over 500 people participate. Earlier versions and extracts from the programme have been taught through design studios at Unitec, AUT and Auckland University.

Finn: "Our goal next is to continue to refine a depth of accessible learning, connection and transformation, rooted in Aotearoa New Zealand, that goes far beyond what most people expect from a typical permaculture course".

Gary: "We started with education because we believe that education is one of the best levers for enduring long term systemic change - a learning journey can be a slow process but the potential impact is huge. We eventually decided to keep APW focussed on education and set up a new company to develop the design business and this is when we started Resilio Studio".

Design by Pocket Studio

A Road to Landscape Architecture and Permaculture

As covered in an LAA interview six years ago, Gary didn’t have a grasp on either landscape architecture or permaculture until he was 24.

His 'aha moment' occurred when he came across the book Design Outlaws by Chris Zelov, which Gary describes as "a treasure trove of interviews with ecological designers and appropriate technology practitioners from the 70’s”.

Gary: “It brought together the worlds of design and ecology - once I had this insight, I was hooked”.

"I had recently graduated from design school and was going to design and make furniture, really nice furniture. As I started to explore this livelihood, I started to have an overwhelming realisation - the world that I was living in was unsustainable ... and unless I made a concerted effort to be part of the solution, I'd be part of the problem.

"I then spent a year studying permaculture followed by landscape architecture at Lincoln for two years. In 2005 I shifted to Auckland to start my landscape architecture career with DJ Scott Associates, followed by time at Jasmax before Resilio Studio".

Sowing seeds for a regenerative future

A strong sense of ethics infuses the ethos within both APW and Resilio Studio, and their duality.

An example of a Resilio Studio / APW overlap is the research and publishing done on forest gardening.

This was spoken to by Gary at the 2025 NZILA Firth Wānanga in Hastings, and is fully replayed in an article on apw.org.nz In brief this sets out the worth of exploring forest gardening that is better suited to the ecosystems of Aotearoa for its potential role in creating a parallel food system.

An Introduction to Forest Gardening in Aotearoa has been released. More guides will follow, and these will be updated as more feedback is gathered from a network of Aotearoa-based forest gardeners who are testing and refining their practices through trial and error.

Separately Resilio Studio has been building a dedicated body of work with an explicit focus on regenerative design, including major contributions to the following:

  • The Te Puhinui Regeneration Strategy - 2022 Link (Note: 'Puhinui Regeneration: moving from strategy to action' was the subject of an NZILA Webinar in March 2023).

  • Mahia Te Maheretanga: Te Ora O Te Wai Pukekohe Action Plan 2022-2023 Link

As Gary stated in 2020, an assumption that there are limits to growth necessarily calls on us to adopt "practices, structures, institutions and patterns of living for a world with less complexity, energy and resources than today".

Gary: "As designers we will always be asked to do more with less ... we will need to stay on our toes (and to stay) flexible, responsive, lean and agile.

Social media links for APW

Recommended further reading

Food Landscapes, Permaculture, #Around-the-motuStephen Olsen