Mary's permaculture garden on Canyon Road has been toured by more than 1200 visitors, featured on the cover of Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Homescale Permaculture, shown on public television's "Southwest Yard and Garden," and discussed on National Public Radio’s "Morning Edition."

Mary and Charles Zemach and their children, Arthur, Dorothy, and Kenneth moved to Los Alamos in 1976. Mary, who began teaching Sunday School in the 1950s, developed a nationally distributed Unitarian Universalist curriculum, "A Good Planet is Hard to Find," which fosters sensible care of the earth.

Mary was president of Jemez House Group Home for ten years and is currently president of the Jemez House Thrift Shop board which raises scholarship money so that children leaving group homes can continue their education. To prevent usable food from going to the landfill, Mary set up a system to distribute grocery store excess to northern NM shelters and food banks. Interested in local self sufficiency in food, she and others in her church started the first Community Supported Agriculture in Los Alamos.

Additional biographical material can be found in the Los Alamos Monitor of September 12, 2004.

Written by Karen Nilsson Brandt, copyright ©