Hi I'm Cas Tognarini,
Mental health nurse, permaculture designer, PhD researcher, and the person who will help you design both the life and the garden that holds you.
I see it all the time, I’ve lived it.
The health professional who gives everything at work and arrives home with nothing left. Who genuinely loves what they do but can't remember the last time that love felt sustainable. Who knows, somewhere underneath the exhaustion, that there has to be a different way to live this.
Sound familiar?
Maybe you've tried the self-care advice. The apps, the boundaries, the mindfulness. And some of it helps, for a moment, before the system swallows it whole again.
What you actually need isn't another coping strategy. It's a design.
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.
Work with me
-
![]()
Free: Intro Workshop Coming Soon
A first look at the Permaculture Nurse Framework and how it applies to your life, your practice, or your clinical setting.
-
![Cas designing in the garden]()
Design to Thrive 1:1 Life & Garden Design
For the burned out health professional, or the person who deeply values their health, who is ready to stop surviving their own life and start designing it.
This is a premium, bespoke design process for the whole ecosystem. Your inner world and your outer one. The person and the land. Designed together so that how you interact with your garden has been built into it from the beginning.
You will stand at your garden gate knowing it was designed for you. Knowing it is caring for you as much as you care for everyone else.
The process spans four months across three consultations, weeks of deep design work, detailed site and personal questionnaires, and a final design you could not mistake for anyone else's.
-
![]()
The Permaculture Nurse Framework for Clinical Teams
For health services, community organisations and professional development leads who want to bring nature-based and social prescribing approaches into their workforce in a structured, evidence-informed way.
This training gives clinical teams the language, the framework, and the practical tools to prescribe and support ecological health interventions with confidence. It's not a wellness workshop. It's professional education built on contemporary mental health research and permaculture design thinking.
Designed for multidisciplinary teams. Adaptable to your context and your people.
About Cas
The nurse. The designer. The researcher. The woman living inside the proof of concept.
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 selling you a version of health I read about. I built it. I tend it. I live inside it every day, including the hard days.
My work sits at the intersection of mental health, social prescribing, permaculture and education. I partner with health professionals and health services to bring ecological thinking into practice. And I work with individuals ready to design a life that holds them as well as they hold everyone else.