A GARDEN GENERATES MORE THAN IT GROWS.
Growing food and flowers, creating habitat and exploring productive garden artistry within an established Australian native garden on a sunny hill in Melbourne’s east.
I’M MIRANDA BLACK
I’m interested in how life gathers around a garden, in food, flowers, habitat, movement, pleasure and connection.
Generate By Design is where I explore that at home by growing, observing, experimenting, and shaping the garden over time.
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 something forward.
For me, Generate By Design is part hobby, part creative practice, part physical movement and part experiment in what thoughtful design can make possible at home.
LATEST FROM THE LEDGER
Spring, Officially
SHED NOTE 001 · 1 SEPTEMBER 2026
Generate By Design comes alive in an Australian suburban garden already full of life, with established native planting settling into its third spring and a productive layer taking root within it. This first Shed Note gathers what has been growing here, what is beginning to change and the possibilities opening from here.
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 shaping a productive layer within the established garden through vegetables, herbs, fruit, edible and cut flowers, propagation and more Australian natives. I want those productive elements to feel as considered and sculptural as the planting around them.
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 making habitat and creating the conditions for more life to move through the garden.
MADE OVER TIME
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.
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.