I’m sitting in a North Devon woodland in a small cabin, and the rain’s drumming on the roof of this little building and the stream is surging past because we’ve had a lot of rain.
Thinking back, what are my highlights for 2025? Well, I’ve got lots, but perhaps one or two big things for me was setting up a couple of years ago, a pied flycatcher monitoring programme, and when we started we just had one nest of this gorgeous little songbird that flies all the way from East Africa to breed in the eastern edges of the British Isles.
And this year, having put up more nest boxes and put them in two triangles, so three in a territory, meant that there was more room for the Pied flycatchers to breed, because the blue tits and the great tits come along and they take a lot of the best spots, the prime nesting places, because they’re native. And so by the time the pied flycatchers fly here all the way from Africa, there’s not much space left for them. Certainly not in the best, kind of situation in a little oak woodland. So, by adding extra boxes and putting them in the territory of particularly blue tits and great tits, you’ll get more opportunity for different species to breed because they’re territorial.
This year I was so thrilled that we had five nesting pairs (that we knew of) in the boxes. All of the young, which is between five or six fledglings actually fledged. So that added a significant increase to the population in, in the woodland.
Another of my highlights was another year of Permaculture magazine. So I’ve been doing this magazine since 1992, which is well over 30 years now. And over the years it’s really evolved and developed.
It’s gone from looking at purely, practical UK projects to having a global view of permaculture, publishing articles from all over the world, to launching the Permaculture Magazine Award, which we do with Lush Spring Prize biannually, to fund projects with very little access to to conventional funding sources. I feel like the vision of this magazine is really growing.
We’ve still got lovely articles about plants to grow, native gardening, regenerative agriculture, woodlands, natural building and renewable technology, all those essential practical strategies for building a very different world to the world that we currently have.
But I also feel that it has grown in vision. We’re seeing more deeply what the power of community is, how we can create projects and community groups and collaborative ways of working together as human beings in harmony, not in conflict.
We’ve been working on this subject way back since the 1990s. But I feel that the permaculture movement is really bearing fruit in this area.
It is a great privilege for me is to do this magazine with my team who, like me, like to meet people.
We don’t have big funders. We’re not great intellectuals. We basically listen to the pulse of all readers and all our subscribers and have an exchange of values and vision with them, as well as practical skills.
So those are, in essence, just a few of the marvellous things that have kept me going this year and help me to carry on my work.
I hope you have a great 2026. Maddy Harland, December 2025.
Maddy Harland is the co-founder and editor of Permaculture magazine and author of Fertile Edges – Regenerating the land, culture and hope.





