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.

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. 🌱

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.

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

25/08/2026

🌿 **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. 🌱

24/08/2026

**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.

23/08/2026

**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.**

Address

74 Billabirra Crescent
Gold Coast, QLD
4211

Website

https://www.ediblescapes.org/

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