WHAT IS SHED NOTES?
Shed Notes is my reflective, thematic, behind-the-scenes writing about the Generate By Design project.
It encompasses writing that isn’t tied to a specific plant, harvest, or zone of my garden, but instead explores ideas, methods, and philosophy behind the garden.
Found in the Ledger, in essence, it’s Generate By Design’s studio diary with topic-driven notes, reflections, methods & experiments, and behind-the-scenes musings that don’t fit in the Index, Grounds, or Harvest.
Shed Notes is where I capture the “thinking” side of Generate By Design. It’s what I did in the garden, what it means, how it fits into my philosophy of gardening, and what it means to me.
Spring, Officially
Generate By Design begins again, this time in an Australian suburban garden on a sunny hill in Melbourne’s east. An existing native landscape becomes the foundation for a new experiment in productive garden architecture, growing food, flowers and habitat with sculptural intent.
SHED NOTE 001 · 1 September, 2026
A section of the Biodiverse Garden Design’s Terraced Courtyard created by Outer Haven Landscapes in late spring 2025, featuring Yellow Buttons (Chrysocephalum apiculatum) and Tall Kangaroo Paw (Anigozanthos “Big Red”) .
A new season, and a new life for an old name.
Spring, officially.
And the day Generate By Design comes alive again.
The name itself isn’t new. Generate By Design was my strategic communications consultancy. It belonged to a period of my life when I did client-facing work, helping people and projects that did good to communicate what they were trying to make happen in the world.
I loved the name because it contained an idea I still believe in. The things we want to exist rarely appear by accident. We can create the conditions for them. We can think about how individual decisions connect. And we can design towards something.
As my health declined, that kind of client-facing work became increasingly difficult to sustain. Generate By Design depended on deadlines, consistency, and a level of capacity my body could no longer reliably provide. Eventually, I had to let the consultancy go.
These days, my life looks rather different. There are no clients and no brief to fulfil for anyone else. I live with chronic illness. My symptoms fluctuate from day to day, and I spend a great deal of time at home.
But Generate By Design as a name never stopped feeling like mine. So I’m reclaiming it, this time as a creative project.
Generate By Design comes alive in my suburban garden on a sunny hill in Melbourne’s east. It marks a shift away from client work and towards a project that belongs to my life here. It is part hobby, part creative practice, part physical movement, part experimentation and part way of paying much closer attention to the place where I live and how I live.
The garden already has a strong life of its own. Thanks to Biodiverse Garden Design and Outer Haven Landscapes, a beautifully designed and landscaped native garden is already flourishing here, now two years old.
Over the past year, I’ve begun adding my own productive layer through vegetable beds, crops, propagation, edible and cut flowers and experiments in how productive growing might sit within the garden as a whole. There is plenty more I want to grow, learn and shape from here.
I’m interested in how a garden already rich in Australian native planting can become increasingly productive, abundant and alive. A place for growing organic food and edible flowers, cultivating more Australian native flowers, creating habitat and exploring how a household-scale ecosystem can flourish in an ordinary suburban setting.
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 making room for more life to gather, feed, shelter and flourish here.
There are seedlings to raise, plants to propagate, materials to reuse, productive spaces to develop and an enormous amount to learn. There will be things that work beautifully and things that don’t. I’m curious about all of it.
I’m especially interested in growing food as part of the garden’s architecture and artistry. Vegetables, herbs, fruit and edible flowers can contribute form, repetition, massing, vertical structure and seasonal change, making food production part of the visual composition of the garden itself.
I want to see what hundreds of decisions, made season by season, can generate here. More food. More flowers. More habitat. More life gathering around the garden.
Seed by seed.
And the first day of spring seems a good day to start telling the story.