Ediblescapes

08/11/2026

🌿 **When the Garden Prepared for Drought, Rain Brought Unexpected Abundance!**

**Ediblescapes 90 m² Garden Journal — October 2026**

October surprised us! Instead of the anticipated dry spring conditions, unusually frequent rainfall brought an extraordinary explosion of spontaneous vegetation to our community edible forest garden in Nerang.

🌱 Our gardeners harvested approximately **500 litres of spontaneous vegetation**, returning it to the garden through composting in place. Five banana plants were also transplanted along the southern boundary.

But this abundance raises a question that has accompanied Ediblescapes for years:

**How can the extraordinary growth of edible wild plants contribute to community food security when so much of their potential remains culturally overlooked?**

From our Biocultural Food Gatherings to the developing Re-evolution recipe initiative, we continue exploring how ecological abundance, food knowledge and cultural diversity can enrich our everyday relationships with food.

🎥 **Watch our October garden walk:**
https://youtu.be/eOQiH67SYqg

📖 **Read the October Garden Journal:**
https://www.ediblescapes.org/garden-journal/october-2026

Follow the changing seasons, our experiments in biointensive syntropic agroforestry, and the questions emerging from this living garden.

**The living garden is always speaking. The interpretive lenses help us listen.**

06/11/2026

🌱 **When we protect nature, what relationships are we protecting — and what relationships might we be excluding?**

We are pleased to share a new reflection in the **Ediblescapes Garden Journal**:

🌿 **Regenerating Our Relationships with Nature: A Dialogue Between Knowledge, Ecology and Community**

Inspired by conversations about conservation, Indigenous relationships with Country, community knowledge and ecological responsibility, this article explores a question that continues to shape our experience at Ediblescapes Garden:

**Can ecological regeneration also involve regenerating the relationships between people, living landscapes, food cultures and community?**

Drawing on our evolving community edible forest garden in Nerang, Gold Coast, we reflect on what it means to learn from a living place — through observation, experimentation, shared knowledge and a willingness to question our own practices.

The article also introduces **Infusiones — Community Biocultural Extension**, an emerging initiative exploring connections between botanical food knowledge, agroecological cultivation and community food autonomy.

This is the first publication in our new **Reflections & Perspectives** section of the Garden Journal.

We don't offer final answers. We invite conversation, different perspectives and continuing learning.

🌿 **The living garden is always speaking. The interpretive lenses help us listen.**

📖 **Read the full reflection:**
https://www.ediblescapes.org/garden-journal/regenerating-our-relationships-with-nature

💬 What kinds of relationships with nature would you like to see our communities cultivate and sustain?

09/10/2026

🌿 **OUR GARDEN JOURNAL IS GROWING — STORIES, FOOD, KNOWLEDGE AND LIVING MEMORY**

Something new is growing on the Ediblescapes Garden website!

We have renewed our **Garden Journal** with new pathways to explore the life of the garden, its ecological transformations, community gatherings and knowledge developed through years of observation and shared practice.

🌱 **LATEST** — What's happening and being learned now.

🌳 **JOURNAL** — Garden observations, ecological transformations and our monthly 90m² garden reports.

🥬 **GATHERINGS** — Community Biocultural Food Gatherings, where food, culture and people come together.

🔎 **KNOWLEDGE** — Living food knowledge, spontaneous plants, botanical discoveries and agroecological practices.

📚 **ARCHIVE** — Our developing collection of garden history and collective memory.

🎬 **TWO NEW VIDEOS — TWO LIVING STORIES**

🥬 **September 2026 Biocultural Food Gathering**

Revisit a morning of harvesting, preparing, tasting and sharing food from the living garden. The video captures community participation, cultural exchange and the introduction of our Commons-Based Community Garden learning conversations.

📖 Explore the article and video:
https://www.ediblescapes.org/garden-journal/september-2026-biocultural-gathering

▶️ Watch directly on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/H4BZVkRcGJI

🌿 **Commelina — A Spontaneous Food of the Living Garden**

What happens when a plant commonly called a w**d becomes a subject of botanical research, cultural food knowledge and community experimentation?

Our second video brings together conversations recorded between **2022 and 2026** — different people, different encounters and a developing understanding of spontaneous vegetation.

The accompanying article connects these living testimonies with botanical identification, documented food traditions and our practice of harvesting abundance to regenerate living soil.

📖 Explore the article and video:
https://www.ediblescapes.org/garden-journal/commelina

▶️ Watch directly on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/yXwwb5w8jHE

🌱 **A GARDEN JOURNAL THAT CONTINUES TO GROW**

The Journal is not intended to be a finished encyclopaedia. It is a living knowledge system where observations accumulate, questions remain open, and community experience contributes to collective learning.

We invite gardeners, educators, researchers, food growers and everyone curious about living ecosystems to explore and share their knowledge.

🌐 **Visit the renewed Garden Journal:**
https://www.ediblescapes.org/garden-journal

**The living garden is always speaking. Together, we are learning to listen.**

💚 Ediblescapes Garden – Country Paradise Parklands, Nerang

The Ediblescapes Garden Journal documents the seasonal evolution of a public edible forest garden through monthly observations, harvests, community learning and ecological reflection.

02/10/2026

🌿 **National Recognition and Support: AFSA Stands with Ediblescapes**

We are deeply grateful to **Dr Tammi Jonas**, Focal Point for Farmers with the **Agroecology & Food Sovereignty Alliance (AFSA)**, for providing a formal letter supporting the continued recognition and protection of Ediblescapes.

Tammi visited the garden in October 2024 as part of AFSA’s Agroecology Roadshow. Drawing upon that direct experience, she describes Ediblescapes as a welcoming example of agroecology in practice—a place where food production, ecological care, culture, learning and community participation come together.

Tammi reflects that agroecology is more than a collection of farming techniques. It is also about relationships, shared knowledge, culture, community and the democratisation of food systems.

In her letter, she writes:

> “I strongly support the continued recognition and protection of Ediblescapes as a community agroecology, education and demonstration site—a bright beacon for agroecology.”

The image of a **beacon** is especially meaningful: not something standing apart from its surroundings, but a light that helps people orient themselves and find one another. The knowledge, relationships and possibilities cultivated within Ediblescapes can travel far beyond the physical boundaries of the garden.

Thank you, Tammi and AFSA, for recognising Ediblescapes’ contribution to the wider agroecology and food sovereignty movement—and its role in helping cultivate more just and resilient food systems.

Read the introduction and AFSA’s full letter in our **National Recognition and Support** section:

👉 https://www.ediblescapes.org/petition

The garden continues living, learning and connecting. 🌱

28/09/2026

🌿 **National Recognition and Support for the Ediblescapes Living Garden**

We have added a new **National Recognition and Support** section to our public page about the future of Ediblescapes.

The section brings together two important contributions:

🌱 **Community Gardens Australia**

A formal letter from **Naomi Lacey, Director of Community Gardens Australia**, supporting the continued presence of Ediblescapes at Country Paradise Parklands. The letter draws upon the direct experience of CGA representatives who visited the garden during the 2024 National Community Gardens Gathering.

🌱 **Costa Georgiadis**

A spontaneous video reflection recorded during Costa’s visit on 27 September 2026. Having followed Ediblescapes from its earliest beginnings and witnessed its transformation over several years, Costa reflects on the garden’s living terraces, soil-building, water retention, ecological layers, edible diversity and public learning.

He describes this approach as:

> **“Engineering with the land—flexibility, suppleness, movement.”**

We are deeply grateful to Naomi, Community Gardens Australia and Costa for taking the time to recognise, experience and communicate the value cultivated within this living garden.

Read the CGA letter and watch Costa’s complete reflection:

👉 https://www.ediblescapes.org/petition

The future of Ediblescapes has not yet been determined. These informed voices help make visible what the garden has become and what it continues to offer the community.

The garden continues living, teaching and transforming. 🌱💚

21/09/2026

🌿 **National Support for the Ediblescapes Living Garden**

We are deeply grateful to **Community Gardens Australia** and its Director, **Naomi Lacey**, for providing a formal letter supporting the continuation of Ediblescapes at Country Paradise Parklands.

Naomi and members of the Community Gardens Australia committee visited and experienced Ediblescapes during the **2024 National Community Gardens Gathering**. Their support is therefore grounded in a direct experience of the garden as a place of edible forest gardening, environmental stewardship, community participation and practical learning.

The letter recognises that Ediblescapes has significance beyond its immediate community:

> “Ediblescapes is a strong example of these principles in action.”

Community Gardens Australia also supports continued dialogue between Ediblescapes and the City of Gold Coast to secure a sustainable future for this important community asset.

We sincerely thank Naomi and Community Gardens Australia for recognising what has been cultivated here and for adding their national voice in support of the living garden.

Read the letter of support:

👉 https://www.ediblescapes.org/petition

The garden continues living, and the conversation continues. 🌱

16/09/2026

🌱 **Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity**

Some of you may remember **Micelio** from our earlier call for expressions of interest and from Gathering 2 of *In Defence of Ediblescapes*.

Since then, something has begun to grow.

We have now published a new **Micelio webpage**, where we are sharing this creative exploration as it develops — not as a finished project, but as a process of observing, imagining, experimenting, making and learning with the living garden.

At the centre of the current exploration is **Living Architecture** and an emerging idea we are calling:

# # # **Living Grove — Nurturing Culture**

What if we didn't simply build a structure and then landscape around it?

What if we began with young trees, light, water, soil, food plants and people — and cultivated a gathering place that could change and grow with them?

Living Grove explores a place where trees grow between and through a temporary human-made structure. As trunks thicken and branches extend, cross and join, the relationship between what was built and what is living can gradually change.

The architecture is therefore not imagined as something finished.

It is something that can be **cultivated through time**.

Our first ideas are already changing as we observe how trees grow, branch, cross, join and occupy space. We are creating three-dimensional digital models that allow us to imagine the place from inside and outside, exploring how young trees might grow through it and gradually become part of the space itself.

But Living Grove is not only about trees and structures.

**Nurturing Culture** is equally important.

We imagine a place for gathering around food and ecology; for sharing knowledge and stories; for tasting, learning, making and creating; and for experiencing relationships between people and the more-than-human living world.

In this sense, the grove is not simply something we grow.

**It is a place where we might grow together.**

Micelio is still young. Like mycelium beneath the soil, much of what it may become has yet to emerge.

We invite you to visit the new page, explore the work as it develops, and follow its cultivation.

🌿 **Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity**
**Living Grove — Nurturing Culture**

https://www.ediblescapes.org/micelio

07/09/2026

🌱 **2016–2026: Approaching Ten Years of Ediblescapes**

How did Ediblescapes become the living garden it is today?

We have added a new **Our History** section to the Ediblescapes website, tracing the evolution of Ediblescapes from the first **Living Art Food Forest concept in October 2016**, through the **2017 Geoglyph Earth Art Project**, to the dense and diverse living garden growing today.

As we approach **ten years since the original concept**, the history tells a story of continuous learning with the land — community-donated trees taking root through recycled-jeans pots, soil building and composting, food production during COVID, successive waves of tree planting, permaculture and agroecology, and the later development of syntropic forest-garden practices.

It is not a story of one gardening system replacing another. Each period has added another layer of practice, knowledge and ecological relationship.

Perhaps the most beautiful continuity is that the original Earth artwork was never replaced by the garden.

**It took root and became the garden.** 🌳

The new section also links to our archived website, preserving documentation of the garden and composting practices through its earlier stages.

👉 **Explore the Ediblescapes story, 2016–2026:**
https://www.ediblescapes.org/about-us

07/09/2026

🌿 **EVENT CANCELLATION NOTICE**

**In Defence of Ediblescapes — Gathering 4: Celebrating and Defending the Living Garden**, scheduled for **Sunday 13 September**, will no longer proceed.

The City of Gold Coast has offered Ediblescapes a temporary extension of its current licence until **27 November 2026**, allowing time for an internal report to be prepared and presented to Council regarding the garden’s longer-term future.

Although no permanent decision has yet been made, this extension creates a different moment—an opportunity to move from an urgent gathering in defence of the garden towards renewed dialogue, closer understanding and bridge-building between Ediblescapes, the City and the wider community.

For this reason, we have decided to cancel the all-day gathering and Vigil for Hope planned for 13 September.

We sincerely thank everyone who intended to attend, contribute an activity, bring a story or photograph, or simply stand alongside the living garden. Your care and support remain deeply valued, and the conversation about Ediblescapes’ future continues.

We warmly invite you instead to our next:

🌱 **Ediblescapes Community Biocultural Food Gathering**
📅 **Saturday 26 September 2026**

Together, we will continue exploring the living relationships between plants, food, soil, culture and community—and sharing the garden as a place of learning, creativity, nourishment and collective care.

The garden continues living, and we continue listening to what it teaches us. 🌿💚