About Ediblescapes
Ediblescapes is a community edible forest garden and public open-space learning place in Nerang. It is a living place of ecological care, shared learning, and practical community participation, where people can experience how food-growing, biodiversity, and public education can grow together.
A Public Edible Forest Garden for Learning, Care and Community
Ediblescapes is a living community landscape shaped through planting, pruning, observation, soil-building, and shared participation. It is not only a place to look at, but a place where people can visit, learn, and experience how ecological food-growing can happen in public open space. Here, edible plants, biodiversity, pathways, gathering places, and practical learning all come together in one evolving garden.
How People Learn Here
People learn at Ediblescapes by walking through the garden, joining activities, observing seasonal change, helping with practical care, and sharing knowledge with others. Learning here is grounded in experience.
A Living Public Place
Ediblescapes invites people to notice relationships between plants, soil, food, and community. It is a place where ecological ideas are made visible through daily practice.
From Community Vision to a Mature Place of Public Ecological Learning
Ediblescapes began from a community vision to create a public place for sustainable food growing, ecological education, and shared learning. Over time, that vision took form through collective effort, formal organisation, and the gradual establishment of a living edible forest garden in Country Paradise Parklands. What began as an idea for public food ecology has grown into a mature place with its own rhythm, identity, and community purpose.
Why It Matters
Ediblescapes helps reconnect food, ecology, and community in a public setting. It shows that edible forest gardening can be part of everyday civic life, not only private backyards.
What It Offers Others
The garden offers practical inspiration for people, groups, and communities who want to adapt similar ideas in their own neighbourhoods, gardens, schools, and public places.
The Values That Guide Ediblescapes
Ediblescapes is guided by values that support ecological care, public learning, and community participation. These values are not abstract ideas only — they are practiced through how the garden is grown, shared, interpreted, and cared for.
Ecological Care
We work with living systems, biodiversity, and soil-building processes that support long-term regeneration.
Shared Learning
We believe people learn deeply through participation, observation, conversation, and hands-on experience.
Commons-Based Participation
Ediblescapes is shaped as a shared public place where people can contribute, learn, and carry ideas outward.
Biocultural Respect
We value food knowledge, cultural diversity, and the many ways communities relate to plants, land, and nourishment.
Practical Regeneration
We support simple, grounded practices that build fertility, reduce waste, and strengthen community resilience over time.
Openness and Invitation
Ediblescapes welcomes people to visit, ask questions, join activities, and take inspiration into other shared places.
Our History
Ediblescapes has evolved through almost a decade of observation, experimentation, community participation and ecological succession. It has never followed a single gardening method. Each period has contributed another layer of knowledge to what has gradually become the living garden of today.
2016–2017 — Living Art Food Forest
The idea began in October 2016, when the concept of a Living Art Food Forest was presented to the Riverkeepers Land-Care group.
In December, shallow contour lines for harvesting surface water and markers outlining part of the proposed garden were placed on the land. On 27 February 2017, the edible landscape concept was formally presented to the Parklands Managing Committee and tenants and received approval in principle.
While waiting for permission to establish the permanent garden, Ediblescapes began cultivating community around the idea. Composting workshops, veggie and seed swaps and public activities brought people, plants and knowledge together.
During the Geoglyph Earth Art Project, the proposed garden design was drawn at landscape scale using mulch and biodegradable pots made from recycled jeans. Community members donated around 100 fruit trees, perennial plants and other useful species, which were temporarily cultivated in these “jeans pots” as part of the living artwork.
Before the permanent forest was planted, the future garden was already growing above the ground.
2018–2019 — The Earth Artwork Takes Root
A Memorandum of Understanding was signed on 12 May 2018, followed by the Sub-licence Agreement completed on 3 May 2019, formally welcoming Ediblescapes Inc. into Country Paradise Parklands.
But the forest had already begun to establish itself through the Geoglyph Earth Art Project.
The trees and perennial plants donated by the community had been positioned within recycled-jeans planting containers incorporated directly into the geoglyph. The planting material sat approximately 80 cm above the original ground level — within 40–50 cm jeans containers over by another 40–50 cm of mulch.
They were never transplanted elsewhere.
As the plants grew, their roots found their own pathways through the cotton fabric at the bottom of the jeans containers, through the decomposing mulch and into the soil below. What began as an artwork drawn across the surface of the land gradually rooted itself into that land.
This makes the geoglyph more than an early design representation of Ediblescapes. The Earth artwork itself became the first physical and biological structure of the garden.
Over time, cotton and other biodegradable materials decomposed and became incorporated into the developing soil. Some synthetic fibres originally present in the recycled jeans can still occasionally be found within the garden today — material traces of the artwork from which the forest emerged.
Meanwhile, Ediblescapes continued building soil through composting, organic matter and water micro-catchments, helping transform the shallow original ground into conditions capable of supporting the developing forest.
This was the first major tree-establishment period of Ediblescapes — not a garden planted after the artwork, but a living artwork that took root and became the garden.
2019–2021 — Permagarden, Food Security and a Second Tree Planting
Alongside the developing food forest, Ediblescapes began creating intensive vegetable-growing areas. Experimentation expanded through hot composting, vermicomposting, bokashi fermentation, microorganism reproduction and biological liquid and solid fertilisers.
When COVID-19 increased local food insecurity, the planned expansion of the forest was temporarily postponed and more space was dedicated to bio-intensive vegetable production.
During 2020 and 2021, approximately 13,000 litres of vegetables were harvested and donated to Nerang's emergency food service.
The combination of intensive food production with a developing ecological food forest became known as the Ediblescapes Permagarden.
In 2020–21, with support from Councillor Peter Young, Ediblescapes entered its second significant tree-planting period, adding approximately 40 fruit trees to the developing forest.
2022 — From Permagarden Towards a More Complex Forest
The emergency social-food program concluded in 2022, allowing the garden to move again towards longer-term forest development.
By this stage, Ediblescapes was no longer simply establishing individual fruit trees and garden beds. Tree canopies were developing, accumulated biomass was cycling through the soil, spontaneous vegetation was interacting with cultivated plants, and gardeners were learning from the changing relationships between soil, water, plants and other organisms.
Permaculture, agroecology, food-forest gardening and living-soil practices increasingly converged within the same landscape.
2023–2024 — The Third Forest Planting: Towards Syntropic Practice
A third major transformation occurred during 2023–2024 with support from a Queensland Government environment grant.
More than 100 additional trees were planted, substantially increasing the density, diversity and vertical structure of the garden.
This was not simply an expansion of the existing fruit-tree collection. The new planting increasingly applied principles of syntropic agroforestry — working with succession, stratification, high-density planting, biomass production and pruning to accelerate ecological processes.
This period marked an important transition from the earlier permaculture food-forest and Permagarden model towards the more complex syntropic forest garden system visible today.
Continuous Planting — A Forest That Regenerates
The three major planting periods are important milestones, but they do not tell the whole story.
Ediblescapes has continued planting approximately 25 or more trees each year from its own resources, while propagating hundreds more plants and trees from cuttings.
Many cuttings are inserted directly into the living soil rather than being treated principally as nursery stock. Some establish, some become biomass, and others contribute roots, organic matter and biological activity while the garden itself participates in determining what persists.
Tree planting at Ediblescapes has therefore gradually changed from a series of planting events into an ongoing process of forest regeneration and succession.
2025–2026 — Gardening with the Living System
As the forest became denser and more mature, gardening itself began to change.
Management increasingly involved observing relationships between canopy layers, sunlight, succession, pruning, spontaneous plants, roots, fungi, microorganisms, insects, birds, water and decomposing biomass.
Syntropic practice became another important lens, alongside permaculture, agroecology, living soil biology and biocultural food knowledge.
The question was becoming less:
What should we plant here?
and increasingly:
How do we participate in what this living system is becoming?
2026 — The Living Garden
Nearly ten years after the first Living Art Food Forest was imagined, Ediblescapes now understands the site as a living garden.
The garden contains the history of all its earlier practices. The geoglyph remains within its spatial memory. Community-donated trees have become mature canopy. Composting helped create its soil. Bio-intensive cultivation demonstrated its capacity for community food production. Permaculture and agroecology shaped its ecological thinking. Syntropic practice increased its density, succession and biomass. Continuous propagation keeps the forest changing.
The 90 m² Garden Project is now observing these processes at a smaller scale, while the Ediblescapes Learning Network invites visitors, schools and community groups to encounter the garden through multiple interpretive lenses.
Ediblescapes has therefore not evolved by replacing one gardening philosophy with another.
It has evolved by accumulating relationships, practices and knowledge, just as a forest develops through succession.
From Living Art Food Forest, to edible landscape, to food forest, to Permagarden, to syntropic forest garden, and now to the living garden — the story continues to grow.
Explore the Ediblescapes Archive
This history continues in Ediblescapes’ original website, now preserved as an archive preview. Its Garden and Composting pages document the early development of the edible landscape, soil-building practices, garden projects and the ideas that shaped Ediblescapes through its formative years.
Explore the historical Garden & Composting archive →
https://ediblescapes.webflow.io/gardens/edible-landscape-garden
The archive preserves an earlier chapter of Ediblescapes’ online history. Some information reflects the garden and organisation as they existed at the time and may no longer represent current practices or activities.
Visit, Learn, and Take Part
Visit, learn, and take part in a living public garden where food-growing, shared care, and ecological learning come together.
