DESIGNING A LIVING FOOD SYSTEM SEED BY SEED.
GROWING FOOD, LIVING LIGHTLY, BUILDING BEAUTY FROM THE GROUND UP ON A SUN-SOAKED MELBOURNE HILL.
I’M MIRANDA BLACK
Welcome to my garden project. I’m truly happy to have you here!
Generate By Design is my garden project, documenting the ongoing evolution of my family’s garden as it grows, adapts, and develops.
It’s about a profound desire to live differently. Not just sustainably, but more intentionally, and this project is the result.
Part notebook, part field study, Generate By Design follows the planting, growing, building, and experimentation involved in shaping our Australian suburban garden as it becomes increasingly productive, biodiverse, and useful to the people, dogs, and other animals who live here.
This is a garden, but it is also a way of seeing and choosing beauty in the face of living with pain and fatigue. I’m learning to grow and restore life to myself, slowly, steadily, seasonally, and within the limits of living with chronic, dynamic illness. And all the while, celebrating the unlimited joy of being out in nature and enjoying all it has to offer.
“Generate By Design is my long-term garden project. It’s an evolving landscape that supports my home, my family and my creativity, and allows me to explore how intentional systems support generative living over time.”
Generate By Design is my attempt at a living notebook of the creation of a garden and its harvest, where abundance for pollinators and people is designed in, and care and nurturing happen at every step.
I’ve spent over twenty-five years shaping a life with less energy than most. I live with chronic illness and dynamic disability.
With this in mind, as I head towards fifty, I’m learning to test small, regenerative systems, such as growing food in rust-rimmed pots and establishing outdoor movement stations amongst the flowers that honour my limited energy and help me build and maintain muscle mass.
ABOUT MIRANDA
The question behind every experiment is simple:
Can thoughtful design stand in for sheer effort and still deliver flavour, movement and beauty?
Can it transform a life and help reclaim wellbeing?
ABOUT THE SITE
Set on a sunny Melbourne hill, the site began as a planting plan for a series of climate-wise Australian native pocket gardens.
Designed by Biodiverse Garden Design at the end of 2023 and completed by Outer Haven Landscapes in 2024, zoned hillside pocket gardens were established throughout the property.
The combined work of this amazing creative team developed the soil health, habitat pockets, water-smart contours and stunning planting design that I celebrate living in every day.
Every bed, trellis and pathway was carefully chosen to allow care, creativity, vitality, and life force to coexist.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Generate By Design is a regenerative garden for food, flowers, and pollinators, built on a foundation of native plants. It’s where native wildflowers and seasonal harvest meet.
Picture an urban food garden, mostly planted in pots.
Picture terracotta and glazed pots grouped tightly to create leafy microclimates on shaded verandahs filled with edible delights.
I’m designing this new layer of the garden day by day to produce enough to feed a household of three humans and two dogs.
That’s the vision!
I am learning to treat every metre of my family’s block, from the street garden and verge to the front courtyard, side gardens, sun-drenched decks, and shaded terraces, as a living sketchbook.
I’ll be adding to the Ledger as the garden grows and the project unfolds. Join me as I add more and more to this project, documenting and capturing the garden as it grows and flourishes.
Maybe you can adapt what I learn for your use?
If even one of these experiments helps you harvest more flavour, move with less pain, or feel more at ease in your terrain, the garden and my story have done their work.
Watch as the garden unfolds …
~ Miranda Black.
Generate By Design is my attempt to build a household-scale ecosystem for growing organic food and edible flowers, while cultivating Australian native flowers in an urban Melbourne garden.