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 in Australia!
And the first day of Generate By Design, regenerated, so to speak.
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: that 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.
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 begins with my suburban garden on a sunny hill in Melbourne’s east. It marks a shift away from doing work for other people 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.
And it isn’t beginning from bare ground. Thanks to Biodiverse Garden Designand Outer Haven Landscapes, a beautifully designed and landscaped native garden is already flourishing here, now two years old.
The existing garden gives Generate By Design a very different starting point to work with, learn from, and add another layer to.
I want to explore how a garden already rich in Australian native plantings can become increasingly productive, beautiful, and alive. A place for growing organic food and edible flowers, cultivating more Australian native flowers, creating habitat and working out how a household-scale ecosystem might function in an ordinary suburban setting.
A garden for people, dogs and other animals.
And by other animals, I mean all of them. The birds overhead, the insects moving through the flowers, the worms underneath us, and the ants already going about their business, whether or not they feature in the plan!
There is an established landscape to respect and work within, alongside veggie beds to build, seedlings to raise, materials to reuse, productive spaces to find 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 whether growing food can become part of a garden's architecture rather than something tucked away from view. Whether vegetables, herbs, fruit, and edible flowers can be grown with sculptural intent, composed through form, repetition, massing, and vertical structure, so that food production becomes part of the artistry of the garden itself.
And whether, by making hundreds of decisions over time, this patch of ground can become a genuinely living system. Seed by seed.
And the first day of Spring seems a good day to begin!