About
Perma
As a 3rd generation gardener with small farm production experience in northern Michigan and an intense passion for preserving the precious lands we call home, Megan Gilger created Perma Studio to bring her land knowledge and background in design to life with the intention of rethinking how we approach landscapes.
Residing in Leelanau County, Megan is deeply passionate about building regenerative gardens and food systems that create a net-positive impact on the ecosystem and the humans interacting with them.
For nearly a decade, Megan has been intertwined in learning, experiencing, and growing her knowledge of caring, listening, and becoming more in tune with nature. As a local to northwest Michigan, she has been around the soils, light, forests, weather, and water all her life. This has made her a fierce protector and advocate for the wild places that build connection, community, and culture.
Megan’s passion drove her to take her knowledge and build on it further by beginning the work to become certified in Permaculture Design through Cornell University. Permaculture is extensive, but summed up, it gives us a philosophy and framework to consciously design landscapes that are truly regenerative. Megan has a heart for paying attention to the land, its patterns, and what it can tell us about working with its natural order.
Previously working in visual design, Megan developed her vision for landscapes from her honed aesthetic and spatial awareness and applied her knowledge and unique sensitivity to the land of northern Michigan to her work. She has spent nearly a decade teaching, consulting, and building gardens that work with nature for protection and production.
Megan is also a member of the Leelanau Conservancy Collective, A Carbon Farming Cohort member of Crosshatch, and teaches regenerative gardening weekly at the Pathfinder School. Her passions deeply lie in creating a world more intimately connected to community, place, and land while being aware of the significant impact we can have in the web of nature.
Though we can only do so much in our time on earth, our land can be an asset of healing and revitalizing the places we call home that will extend far beyond us.
Humans can be healers, stewards, and life-givers to the lands we love.
What is Permaculture?
-
Focused on preserving what exists and then regenerating what has been degraded.
-
This is focused on providing for the individual and community needs
-
Finding ways to share excess, find limits for consumption, and create a plan for the surplus.
At Perma Studios, we use a simple set of ethics developed in 1978 by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in Tasmania, Australia, to develop a science and observation-based system to design landscapes and human lifestyle systems.
Using the principles and ethics of a design system such as permaculture offers a framework to establish landscapes that are consciously designed and scientifically informed. This ensures the system we design will create a net-positive impact on human, community, and ecosystem.