Hi I'm Cas Tognarini,
Mental health nurse, permaculture designer, PhD researcher, and the person who will help you redesign both the life and the garden that holds you.
I see it all the time, I’ve lived it.
The woman who holds everyone together but can't remember the last time someone asked if she was okay. The health professional who gives everything at work and arrives home with nothing left.
Sound familiar?
Maybe you've tried the self-care advice. The apps, the boundaries, the mindfulness. And some of it helps, for a moment.
What you actually need isn't another coping strategy. It's a redesign.
A home that restores you when you walk through the door. A garden that feeds you, literally and otherwise. Daily rhythms that ground you before the world takes over. A village that holds you as steadily as you hold everyone else.
I'm here to help you design exactly that. Not a perfect life. But a tended one.
Health is an ecosystem. Tend to it with attention, design it with care, and let it be wild.
The Permaculture Nurse Framework is a living systems model for health and wellbeing. It maps the whole person, from the innermost world of the individual, their nervous system, identity, meaning and capacity, outward through their home, their daily practice, their community, their relationship with the living world, and into the systems of care that surround them.
It's built on three mechanisms that permaculture activates in every person who engages with it.
Reconnection.
To self, to nature, to others, to meaning.
Regeneration.
Building capacity over time, not just managing symptoms.
Reciprocity.
The shift from surviving to contributing. From depleted to held.
12 Permaculture Principles
for Your Health
One year of exploration, distilled into a practical guide for tending your health like a living ecosystem.
Work with me
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Life Zone Mapping Tool
A mapping tool that walks you through each zone of your life, from Zone 00 inward self outward to Zone 6 community, and helps you see clearly what's being tended and what's been neglected.
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Permaculture for Health Workshop (coming soon)
A first look at the Permaculture Nurse Framework and how it applies to your life
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![Cas designing in the garden]()
1:1 Permaculture Design
For the woman who wants the whole permaculture redesign with someone who has done it.
The nurse. The designer. The researcher. The woman living inside the proof of concept.
About Cas
I'm a mental health nurse with over a decade of clinical experience. A permaculture designer who lives and works on Little Tern Farm, a permaculture property I designed on Yaegl Country in the Clarence Valley, NSW. A PhD candidate researching the intersection of ecological design and mental health. A homeschooling mother of two. A person living with a chronic health condition inside a life I designed to hold it.
I am not sharing you a version of health I read about. I built it. I tend it. I live inside it every day, including the hard days.
“Care improves when systems are designed to support the people within them”
- THE PERMACULTURE NURSE