Ediblescapes

🌱 **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 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

**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.

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

🌿 **Community Voices for the Living Garden**

We have added a new section to the **In Defence of Ediblescapes** page, sharing personal testimonies from people who have visited, learned, volunteered, shared food and experienced community within the living garden.

These voices describe Ediblescapes as a place of family learning, regenerative knowledge, food security, belonging, ecological care and connection across generations.

We are deeply grateful to everyone who has shared their experience and spoken about what Ediblescapes means to them.

Read the Community Voices here:

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

If Ediblescapes has contributed to you, your family or your community, we also invite you to share your story. Your voice can help demonstrate why this living community resource matters and why it should be allowed to continue.

Please email your testimony to **[[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])** and let us know whether you give permission for your name and statement to be published.

Thank you for standing with the living garden. 🌱

**IN DEFENCE OF EDIBLESCAPES — ISSUES AND RESPONSES UPDATED**

The Ediblescapes public-information page has been updated with detailed responses to four matters raised in the City’s correspondence:

• Biochar maker—not a waste incinerator
• White Ginger in two managed public landscapes
• The shallow water channel responding to recurrent shelter flooding
• Temporary storage within the existing community shelter

Each response presents the historical context, Ediblescapes’ explanation, corrective actions already taken and supporting photographic evidence.

Our purpose is not to blame individual officers. It is to help establish a complete, balanced and properly contextualised public record so that the future of the living garden can be considered fairly.

Read the updated **In Defence of Ediblescapes — Issues and Responses**:

https://www.ediblescapes.org/petition -3

Please read and share with others who care about the future of the Ediblescapes living garden.

**IN DEFENCE OF EDIBLESCAPES — WHY A COMPLETE RECORD MATTERS**

Ediblescapes has received further correspondence from the City concerning the Notice of Non-Renewal.

The City states that the decision was not made by an individual officer, but followed consideration involving several relevant City officers across the organisation. The City has also confirmed that it does not presently intend to place the Notice on hold.

We acknowledge that several officers may have participated. However, our concern is whether everyone involved received complete, current and balanced information.

Several matters referred to in the non-renewal decision originated during Ediblescapes’ earlier years under the Country Paradise Parklands sublicence or during discussions before the first direct Deed of Licence in June 2024. These matters had already been discussed, explained or addressed before the direct licence was established.

For more than a year following the later licence renewal, Ediblescapes received no communication from Parks and Recreation identifying these historical matters as continuing or unresolved concerns.

Councillor Peter Young’s intervention may now provide an opportunity for the elected Council to request a new review. We welcome that possibility.

However, a review can only be fair and meaningful if Councillors receive the complete and updated history—not simply the same administrative account repeated without Ediblescapes’ explanations, evidence, subsequent actions and progress.

We are therefore asking that any report presented to Council:

• includes Ediblescapes’ submissions and supporting documents;
• distinguishes historical matters from conduct during the current Deed of Licence;
• identifies the information relied upon in reaching the decision; and
• gives Ediblescapes an opportunity to correct factual inaccuracies or missing context.

This is not about blaming individual officers. It is about ensuring that elected Councillors can consider the future of the living garden using a complete, balanced and properly contextualised record.

We will continue updating the public correspondence and supporting evidence here:

https://www.ediblescapes.org/petition

With gratitude to everyone who has signed the petition, shared testimony and expressed support for the Ediblescapes living garden.

**Ediblescapes Inc.**

# The Same Plant in Two Managed Public Landscapes?

# # White Ginger at Ediblescapes and the Broadbeach Cultural Centre

Photographs taken in February and March 2024 show white ginger (*Hedychium coronarium*) flowering within an approximately one-square-metre area at the Ediblescapes Living Garden. Following direction from a City biosecurity officer, Ediblescapes removed the plant and provided the material to the officer for appropriate disposal.

During the NENA Conference, held from 10 to 12 October 2025, plants with similar foliage and white flowers were observed in landscaped garden beds beside the renovated Broadbeach Cultural Centre, formerly the Albert Waterways Community Centre.

On 23 August 2026, plants strongly resembling the same species were documented in three landscaped locations around the Cultural Centre. They were not flowering at the time, so their identity should be formally confirmed. However, their foliage and growth habit appear strongly consistent with the white ginger previously documented at Ediblescapes.

This comparison is not presented to accuse an individual officer, facility or contractor. The identity and planting history of the Cultural Centre plants should first be confirmed. Nor is this about comparing the quantity of plants at the two locations.

Rather, these observations raise constructive questions:

**How consistently are environmental-w**d classifications and biosecurity directions applied across different forms of City-managed or City-associated land?**

**Why might a plant require removal from a community agroforest while apparently remaining within a maintained ornamental public landscape?**

**Are management decisions based only on species identity, or do they also consider location, ecological behaviour, containment, reproduction and demonstrated risk?**

Ediblescapes complied with the direction it received. This comparison invites a transparent explanation and a more contextual conversation about how biosecurity responsibilities are interpreted across public landscapes.

# # Beyond the Fixed Landscape: Weeds, Migration and Living Intelligence

Australian government and environmental-management frameworks commonly distinguish between native, introduced, exotic and invasive species. These classifications are important. Some introduced plants spread aggressively, displace vulnerable species, alter fire behaviour, damage waterways or create other serious ecological consequences.

However, the word **w**d** can also carry an incomplete understanding of how living landscapes develop.

It may suggest that nature once existed as a complete and permanently arranged collection of plants and animals—and that ecological movement and transformation began only with European colonisation and subsequent human migrations.

The Earth was not created with every forest, grassland and species permanently attached to its present location. Landscapes have always changed.

Plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms have moved, settled, adapted and transformed ecosystems through wind, water, birds, ocean currents, fire, climatic cycles, volcanic activity and tectonic change. Human communities have also participated in these processes through gathering, cultivation, burning, travel, exchange, settlement and care.

For tens of thousands of years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have lived within and actively shaped Australian landscapes through sophisticated systems of ecological knowledge and custodianship. Australian nature at the time of European invasion was not a landscape without people. It had been composed through long relationships between human and more-than-human life.

European colonisation nevertheless introduced ecological change of extraordinary speed and scale: extensive land clearing, grazing, mining, altered waterways, changed fire regimes and the movement of plants and animals across biogeographical boundaries. Many of these introductions caused—and continue to cause—substantial ecological harm.

Recognising that ecosystems are dynamic does not mean that every introduced species is harmless or that invasive-species management is unnecessary.

It means that ecological judgement should not rest on origin alone.

A plant’s ecological meaning also depends upon:

* how it behaves in a particular landscape;
* whether it spreads beyond the place where it is managed;
* what relationships it forms with soil, water, insects, animals and other plants;
* whether it displaces or supports other living communities;
* what risks or benefits it produces;
* how people contain, harvest or care for it; and
* what can be learned through sustained observation.

A plant may be food within one cultural relationship, habitat within another ecological relationship and a serious threat in a different landscape. These realities can coexist.

The question is not simply whether a plant was here before or arrived later, but:

**What is it doing here, within this particular living system, under these particular conditions of care or neglect?**

# # The Intelligence Present in the Garden

This conversation involves more than one form of intelligence.

There is human intelligence: scientific research, Indigenous ecological knowledge, cultural memory, gardening experience, professional practice and public administration.

There is also developing artificial intelligence, which can help gather literature, connect ideas and communicate across communities. Ediblescapes calls its collaborating AI agent **EdibleAI**. Its role is not to replace ecological observation or claim authority over the garden. It helps Ediblescapes gardeners interpret information, articulate their experience and communicate their relationships with the wider community.

Beneath both is a deeper and more primary intelligence: the intelligence expressed by living biology itself.

It is present in the adaptive behaviour of roots, exchanges between fungi and plants, vegetation’s responses to disturbance, the movement of insects and birds, the succession of species and the continuous transformation of soil.

This living intelligence does not speak through government classifications or human language. It becomes perceptible through careful presence, observation, experience and relationship.

The Ediblescapes Living Garden offers a place where different forms of knowledge can meet: regulation and scientific evidence, Indigenous and cultural food knowledge, gardening experience, digital interpretation and the testimony of the living system itself.

From this perspective, **w**d** should not be treated only as an unquestionable identity permanently attached to a plant. It should also begin a contextual conversation:

**What is this plant doing in this place?**

**What relationships is it forming?**

**What harm requires prevention?**

**What food, habitat, knowledge or ecological function might be overlooked?**

**Can it be responsibly contained and harvested, or must it be removed?**

These questions do not weaken environmental responsibility. They deepen it by joining precaution and regulation with consistent administration, careful observation, cultural knowledge and the changing intelligence of life.

# # 🌱 CALL FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST

# # # **Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity**

**In 2017, we responded creatively to a possibility.**
**In 2026, we invite the creative community to respond to what that possibility has become.**

Nearly ten years ago, before Ediblescapes became the Community Edible Forest Garden we know today, we used **Earth Art as a way of planting a future**.

For the 2017 Botanical Garden Festival, mulch and recycled jean pots were used to paint a large **Geoglifo** across the landscape at Country Paradise Parklands.

The work drew from the cultural influence of geoglyphs from the Pacific coast of the Central Andean region and became more than an artwork.

It became part of the strategy for initiating a **Public Edible Landscape Gardens Project**.

🌱 Trees were planted.
🌱 Soil developed.
🌱 People came.
🌱 Knowledge was shared.
🌱 Relationships grew.

The artwork gradually disappeared into the landscape — and **Ediblescapes emerged from it.**

Now, as Ediblescapes approaches its tenth year and faces uncertainty about its continuation, we want to respond again through **creative action**.

Not only by protesting what could be lost, but by **planting seeds for what could come next**.

This is the beginning of:

# # # **Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity**

Micelio invites artists, photographers, filmmakers, storytellers, designers, scientists, gardeners, educators, cultural knowledge holders, students, digital creators — and people who may not call themselves any of these things — to form a diverse creative group around the living garden.

Together we will explore:

**What has the original Earth Artwork become after nearly ten years of ecological and community growth?**

And:

**How can we creatively express the living relationships between soil, plants, food, culture, biodiversity, community and care that exist here today?**

Your response might become a photograph, drawing, installation, story, sound work, video, performance, scientific observation, digital experiment — or something we have not yet imagined.

**Come to the start-up gathering.**
**Become part of the Micelio creative group.**
**Make your creative response your statement in defence of Ediblescapes — and your participation in its future.**

📅 **Saturday 29 August 2026**
🕤 **9:30 am–12:30 pm**
📍 **Ediblescapes Community Forest Garden**
Country Paradise Parklands, Nerang

No particular artistic background is required.

Bring your practice, your knowledge, your curiosity, or simply **your own way of seeing**.

🌱 **In 2017, we planted an artwork into the landscape.**
**Nearly ten years later, we invite you to create with the living artwork it became.**

**Micelio — Cultivating Creative Biodiversity**
*Creativity, like biodiversity, becomes stronger through relationships.*

💚 **In Defence of Ediblescapes — planting futures, not endings.**

https://www.facebook.com/share/1HQkRzq1X7/

🌿 **In Defence of Ediblescapes — Community Update and Gratitude**

At today’s gathering at Ediblescapes, we shared an update on the City’s decision not to renew the garden’s licence and discussed the next stage of the community response.

We also collected signed hard-copy petitions. Later today, during the Country Paradise Parklands tenants’ meeting, the petition was formally passed to Councillor Peter Young.

With the support of the community behind him, Cr Young intends to bring this matter before the elected Council and seek a Council review of the administrative decision concerning the Ediblescapes licence.

If the motion is supported, it will begin a formal Council review of the case. We remain hopeful that this process will lead to a fair and positive outcome for the Ediblescapes living garden.

On behalf of the Ediblescapes Management Committee and core team, I wish to express our most sincere gratitude to everyone who has:

🌱 Signed the petition
🌱 Shared your concerns
🌱 Offered your testimony and personal experiences
🌱 Commented on and shared our Facebook posts
🌱 Stood with Ediblescapes during this important moment

Your voices demonstrate that Ediblescapes is not simply a garden managed by one organisation. It is a living community place, created through years of shared learning, voluntary care and relationships.

Thank you for standing with the living garden. We will continue to keep the community informed as the Council process develops.

With sincere gratitude,

**Jorge Cantellano**
On behalf of the Ediblescapes Management Committee and core team