Ediblescapes

Ediblescapes A welcoming edible forest garden for food sovereignty, climate resilience and biocultural learning.

EdibleScapes is an urban ecological environmental community organisation, with a mission to support, promote and provide education about community based, ecologically sustainable food production and distribution. Where garden action meets biocultural food traditions — practical, friendly, and regenerative. Ediblescapes is a free, open-access community edible forest garden within Country Paradise P

arklands (Nerang, Gold Coast). For more than 8 years, Ediblescapes has grown into a living, hands-on demonstration of permaculture, natural gardening, agroecology and syntropic edible forest garden practice — showing what a regenerative, multi-species community food forest can look like in public space. Stewarded by community volunteers, Ediblescapes supports food security, climate resilience and biodiversity through soil-building practices, shared learning, and welcoming participation. In 2026 we’re launching Biocultural Food Re-evolution — practising and sharing Indigenous and smallholder food traditions, supporting community food sovereignty through real, hands-on regenerative learning, and strengthening the nature-based, experiential side of Ediblescapes for visitors interested in cultural immersion and regeneration. We acknowledge the support of Cr Peter Young (City of Gold Coast, Division 5), City of Gold Coast teams, and the Queensland Government’s Department of the Environment, Tourism, Science and Innovation.

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. 🌿💚

🌱 **August 2026 — Ediblescapes 90 m² Garden Report is now published**What is a harvest — and who is it for?This month, t...
06/09/2026

🌱 **August 2026 — Ediblescapes 90 m² Garden Report is now published**

What is a harvest — and who is it for?

This month, that simple question took us beyond harvesting food for people. Flowering biomass was selectively cut before seed dispersal, while roots remained in the soil and the harvested material stayed within the garden — becoming food for living soil and material for the next cycle of growth.

August also invited us to observe water differently: how dense vegetation, canopy, roots and deep organic soil help retain moisture; what changes when we remove protective biomass; and how the garden asks us to respond to the consequences of our own interventions.

Two videos accompany this month's report: Javana gardening and speaking while working on 18 August, and a quiet end-of-month walk that invites you to enter the garden, listen and make your own observations.

Perhaps a Garden Report is not only about collecting measurements. Sometimes the living garden asks us to reconsider **what we thought we were measuring.**

🌿 **Read and watch the August Garden Report:**
August 2026 — Ediblescapes 90 m² Garden https://www.ediblescapes.org/garden-journal/august-2026

03/09/2026

🌱 **A small glimpse into the living cycles of Ediblescapes.**

Our August Garden Report follows how plants move from food and ground cover into biomass, soil life and the next generation of the garden.

🎥 Watch the Reel, and discover the full **August Garden Report** on YouTube:

[Watch the full August Garden Report](https://youtu.be/u4htvLbNVm4?si=CGNI2fwxoyvVVGTh&utm_source=chatgpt.com)

03/09/2026

🌱 **What happens when yesterday’s food plants become tomorrow’s soil?**

In the Ediblescapes garden, cutting a plant is not necessarily the end of its life in the garden. It can be the beginning of another cycle.

In our **August 2026 Garden Report**, Javana takes us through a section of the Ediblescapes Community Edible Forest Garden as we cut back plants before they go to seed, leave their roots underground, and return the green biomass directly to the garden.

Instead of becoming waste, this plant material helps protect and feed the soil, supporting fungi, worms and other soil life while gradually creating fertile ground for the next generation of edible plants.

As the older vegetation is selectively cut back, younger plants are given more space and light to emerge—including moringa, sweet leaf, mulberry, hibiscus and many others growing within this diverse garden community.

🌿 **What we harvest, cut and return today becomes part of what the garden can grow tomorrow.**

Watch the full **August Garden Report** on YouTube:

[Watch the August Garden Report on YouTube](https://youtu.be/u4htvLbNVm4?si=CGNI2fwxoyvVVGTh&utm_source=chatgpt.com)

31/08/2026

🌿 **A New Opportunity for Ediblescapes and the Living Garden**

The City of Gold Coast has offered Ediblescapes a temporary extension of its current licence agreement until **Friday 27 November 2026**, while an internal report is prepared for Council’s consideration regarding the garden’s longer-term future at Country Paradise Parklands.

This is not yet a permanent decision, nor do we see it as a victory over anyone.

We welcome it as an opportunity: time to listen, to strengthen relationships and to build bridges between the community, elected representatives and City officers around a shared purpose—the wellbeing of our community and the living environment that holds and shelters us all.

We sincerely thank **Cr Peter Young** for bringing the community petition before Council and advocating for Ediblescapes to remain while its future is properly considered. We also thank **all elected councillors who supported his motion**, opening the way for this period of further consideration.

Our deepest gratitude goes to the many people who signed the petition, spoke publicly, shared the campaign and contributed personal testimonies about what Ediblescapes has meant in their lives. Your experiences have helped make visible the garden’s educational, ecological, cultural and community value.

During this extension, we hope to present Ediblescapes as it truly lives: not as a fixed landscape, but as a dynamic relationship between people, soil, plants, water, insects, birds, microorganisms and seasons.

A living garden carries abundance and its own pulse. It moves through cycles of growth, flowering, harvest, decay and renewal. What may sometimes appear untidy is often life reorganising itself—feeding the soil and preparing the conditions for rebirth.

Over the coming months, we invite the City, councillors and the wider community to come closer, walk through the garden, listen to its stories and experience what has been cultivated here through many years of collective care.

May this time help us find common ground and imagine a future shaped not by division, but by cooperation—a future that generates good for the good living of the community and for the environment that contains us all beneath the great shelter of Mother Earth.

The garden continues living, and the conversation continues. 🌱

🌱 **An Invitation to Gold Coast Educators and Community Organisations****Come and experience Ediblescapes Living Garden ...
30/08/2026

🌱 **An Invitation to Gold Coast Educators and Community Organisations**

**Come and experience Ediblescapes Living Garden as a living educational resource.**

This Saturday, 5 September, we invite teachers, educators, early childhood practitioners, university and TAFE educators, community development workers, environmental educators, cultural organisations and others interested in experiential learning to visit Ediblescapes in Nerang.

Ediblescapes is a community edible forest garden where learning happens within a living system.

Rather than learning about soil, biodiversity, food systems, ecology and culture only through books or screens, visitors can walk among these relationships: observing how plants grow together, how organic matter becomes living soil, how food connects cultures, and how a community can participate in caring for a shared living place.

Over almost a decade, Ediblescapes has developed as an evolving demonstration garden and community learning environment. We are now exploring how this living resource can contribute more intentionally to educational experiences across the Gold Coast.

On Saturday, we will introduce the garden and its developing learning approach, including experiential pathways through:

• edible forest gardening and agroecology
• permaculture and syntropic practices
• soil and living biology
• biodiversity and ecological relationships
• biocultural food knowledge
• community stewardship and the commons
• observation, creativity and learning with a changing landscape

This is also an invitation to conversation.

How could a living edible forest garden become useful to your students, learners, organisation or community?

Come to the garden, experience it for yourself, and help us explore the possibilities.

📅 **Saturday 5 September 2026**
📍 **Ediblescapes Community Edible Forest Garden**
Country Paradise Parklands, Nerang, Gold Coast

🌱 **The living garden is always speaking. We learn by observing, participating and listening.**

Educators and community organisations across the Gold Coast are warmly invited.

Please share this invitation with schools, educational institutions, community organisations and people who may be interested.

From Geoglyph to Living Garden — Micelio begins 🌱🍄These two images are nine years apart.In 2017, before Ediblescapes bec...
29/08/2026

From Geoglyph to Living Garden — Micelio begins 🌱🍄

These two images are nine years apart.

In 2017, before Ediblescapes became the edible forest garden we know today, the landscape was imagined through a Geoglyph Art for Landscape Garden Design. The solar-calendar geometry located pathways, garden areas and future plantings.

The design was clearly visible.

In 2026, trees have grown, canopies meet, roots occupy the soil, organic matter continually returns to the earth, and people have spent years planting, pruning, harvesting, learning and caring.

The original geometry is now much harder to see.

But has the design disappeared?

Perhaps the design has been living.

The geoglyph was not simply a picture for the garden to resemble forever. It established relationships from which a garden could grow. What began as lines and planting positions has progressively become trees, soil, shade, food, biodiversity, pathways and community experience.

This nine-year transformation gives us the starting point for a new Ediblescapes creative exploration:

Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity.

Micelio begins by listening to the living garden.

How does a canopy create space through light and shade?
How does water travel through leaves, organic matter and soil?
How do roots, fungi and microorganisms inhabit the world beneath our feet?
How do growth, decomposition, succession and human care continually remake a place?

And then comes the creative question:

How might we translate these living behaviours into physical, sensory and immersive experiences?

Through art, making, photography, sound, storytelling, gardening, materials, digital technologies and whatever other creative practices enter the conversation, Micelio will explore these questions over time.

We are not beginning with a predetermined artwork or a building proposal.

We are beginning with observation, experimentation and successive creative processes — allowing one exploration to create conditions for another.

Perhaps, eventually, some of these investigations will contribute to what we are beginning to call Living Architecture: spaces that are not simply decorated with ecology, but are conceived through learning from how living systems themselves create and transform space.

Micelio is open. You don't need to call yourself an artist, scientist, designer or gardener to participate. Curiosity and another way of seeing are already something to contribute.

For now, we begin where Ediblescapes itself began:

with an idea, a living place, and the willingness to see what might grow.

🌱 2017 → 2026 → ?

Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity
An Ediblescapes living garden initiative

28/08/2026

**IN DEFENCE OF EDIBLESCAPES — ISSUE FIVE PUBLISHED**

Ediblescapes has published a new evidence-based response:

**Nature-Based Tourism Grant and the Unanswered Permission Clarification**

Before submitting the grant application, Ediblescapes informed Recreation Services of the proposal and requested guidance.

When Recreation Services replied, Ediblescapes responded on the same day. We clarified that the project’s first phase focused on capacity-building and that any visitor infrastructure would proceed only once the necessary permissions were in place.

We also directly asked whether Ediblescapes could submit a formal Project Proposal during its provisional period.

That question was not answered.

The published response presents the documented sequence, the original correspondence and the distinction between applying for funding and receiving permission to undertake physical works.

Our purpose is to establish a complete and balanced public record so the future of the Ediblescapes Living Garden can be considered fairly.

Read **Issue Five** and the other published responses:

https://www.ediblescapes.org/petition

Please read and share in support of a fair, proportionate and evidence-based conversation.

26/08/2026

Thank you, Cr Peter Young, for standing with Ediblescapes 🌿

We would like to acknowledge and sincerely thank **Cr Peter Young** for his clear support for Ediblescapes during yesterday’s City of Gold Coast Council meeting.

In presenting the community petition, Cr Young spoke about Ediblescapes as a **“very popular and very well recognised facility”** and raised directly the importance of allowing the garden to remain while Council considers the matter.

For Ediblescapes and the many community members who have offered their support, it was important to hear our local elected representative speak clearly for the living garden and ensure the community petition was heard.

We do not yet know what the formal process or outcome will be, and we will wait for official Council communication before making any statement about that.

Today, however, we simply want to recognise and appreciate Cr Young for standing up for Ediblescapes and for bringing the community’s voice into the Council chamber.

Thank you, Peter. 🌱💚

**Watch Cr Young’s intervention in the Council meeting:**
[Council meeting — Ediblescapes petition discussion]https://www.youtube.com/live/CX1RcJGXx9o?si=6lcX1jhLaovv8bOY&t=13801

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74 Billabirra Crescent
Gold Coast, QLD
4211

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