For me, a designed garden offers more than beautiful plants; it generates vibrant life and instils hope.
Growing food and flowers, creating habitat, and exploring productive garden artistry in my established Australian native garden on a sunny hill in Melbourne’s east.
A garden that motivates me on the worst days of chronic illness and feeds my life force on my best days.
I’m Miranda Black
I’m interested in how life can gather around a garden, in food, flowers, habitat, movement, pleasure and connection.
Generate By Design is where I explore how growing, observing, experimenting, and shaping my garden over time can improve my life at home.
I live with dynamic illness, so the garden also has to meet me where I am. Some days, that might mean planting or propagating. Other days it may simply mean noticing, planning, learning or making one small decision that moves one of my garden projects forward. Even if it is just a small step towards achieving it. If I can spend ten minutes with my hands in the soil, then that’s a good day!
For me, Generate By Design is part hobby, part creative practice, part physical movement and part experiment in what thoughtful design can make possible when spending a lot of time at home due to chronic illness.
FIRST ENTRY IN the Ledger
Spring, Officially
SHED NOTE 001 · 1 SEPTEMBER 2026
The Generate By Design ledger, my garden blog, comes alive in my relatively new Australian suburban garden, which is already full of life.
This first Shed Note describes what’s been growing here, what is beginning to change, and the new possibilities for the garden that give me hope!
Where Generate By Design Begins
Generate By Design begins within a flourishing Australian native garden, now settling into its third spring.
The garden was professionally designed and built around a brief I gave for how the property needed to work: a walled front garden, sheds at the back for storage, climbers along the fences and a native verge garden in place of the grass that runs along most of the street. I was on site every day during the build, answering questions as they arose and watching the garden take shape day by day.
That process gave me an unusually close understanding of the site: how we move through it, how the different spaces connect and what the established structure makes possible.
Generate By Design grows from that knowledge. I’m now focused on shaping a productive layer within the established garden through vegetables, herbs, fruit, edible and cut flowers, propagation and more Australian natives. I want the productive elements to feel as considered and sculptural as the planting around them while feeding me at the same time!
The Productive Layer
I want food growing to become part of the garden’s architecture and artistry.
Vegetables, herbs, fruit and edible flowers are grown for harvest and for their visual contributions: form, repetition, massing, vertical structure and seasonal change. Cut flowers and propagated Australian natives add another productive layer, bringing more of the garden into the house and more flowers into the garden itself.
The aim is a garden that produces generously while still feeling composed. Food, flowers and habitat belong together as part of one considered landscape.
A Household Scale Ecosystem
A garden for us, the dogs and other animals.
The birds overhead, insects moving through the flowers, worms beneath the soil and skinks going about their business are part of the garden too. As I grow more food and flowers, I want to keep creating habitat and conditions for more life to move through the garden.
I want pollinators and flowers to come together and feed our ecosystem. I know this is the way to secure delicious produce to eat and help save our precious bees and our planet.
I hope my garden inspires you!
The garden in progress
The garden has already changed enormously, and I want to keep shaping it with intention and imagination.
I watched the original native garden take shape during the build and have photographed it as the planting has established over the past two years. More recently, I’ve begun adding my own productive layer, shaping the garden as a creative practice through vegetable beds, crops, propagation, edible and cut flowers and new experiments in how the garden can work.
It hasn’t been easy in that time, aside from living with chronic illness my whole life,, but in a more extreme way since 1999; I’ve been diagnosed with a range of additional chronic illnesses. Next year I am fifty, and I’m determined to ensure I retain my movement in the face of some challenges.
The Ledger moves backwards and forwards through that history, following how the established garden has grown, the productive layer taking shape within it, and what comes next.