I’ve wanted to make this post for a while ever since @UnicornEmily suggested it a while back. Grateful for your suggestion and patience 
Grateful also to you and @Lowell_McCampbell who have heard me talk about “gardening by guna” and expressed curiosity or challenge in the spirit of growing understanding.
Vrikshayurveda is a traditional system of growing, native to India. Honestly I am not qualified to speak about it at any length. But because I believe it has significant value to humankind and is little-known, and because the principles it shares in common with Ayurveda (Indian traditional medicine) greatly inform what I try to do as a grower, in hopes of inspiring others to explore it for themselves and improving my own understanding I will talk about it a little.
Vrikshayurveda is often translated as “Ayurveda for trees”. A more useful translation for most people is “the science of tree life”, or perhaps more liberally “the science of plant life”. To the best of my knowledge there are two texts by this name. The better-known is written by Surapala.
I have not read a complete English translation of either text, though I have read a significant excerpt from a translation of Surapala’s text of the same name. I haven’t found them as easy to find as one might hope (i.e. free and legal), though you can certainly find them. All I’ve done is be an informal student of Ayurveda for fifteen years, hear recorded testimonial from a farmer using kunapajala, and since last year tried to grow according to the gunas (qualities or energetics) of plant and environment.
To me the key insight I took from my limited contact with this system of growing was that, just like forms of life with mind, plants are comprised of the five elements and governed by the three vital principles of vata, pitta, and kapha. If you ever saw the children’s cartoon Captain Planet, the five elements are mostly the planeteer elements, with space taking the place of heart.
Consider a banana tree. The fruit of the banana tree is sweet, heavy, and cooling. It has more gunas than that, but limiting this simple example to three makes it more digestible. Now take the pepper plant, whose fruit is pungent, light, and heating. Assuming the gunas of the plant are reasonably well-represented by its fruit, and knowing that these qualities oppose and thereby balance those of the banana, we can infer that pepper makes a good companion to banana when grown in balanced soil. This would appear to be the case of traditional agriculture is an indicator - - I have heard planting banana with pepper is a traditional form of intercropping in the Phillipines.
The three sisters are another excellent example of gardening by guna:
Squash
Heavy, cooling, wet
Beans (most pole)
Light, cooling
Corn
Light, heating, dry
That’s all. All I hoped to do this evening was put this traditional growing system on the radar of folks who might be interested.
In the end I really think the best thing would be to learn to talk to plants and animals, as many people in traditional cultures have done historically, and thereby know much more easily what to grow and how. But because this ability is disappearing from the modern world and I don’t have it and can’t teach it, I can just share a little information and hope it serves you.
