You just think: mmm… delicious. That’s what I want!

When there’s talk about funding and verge garden projects, it’s the same. We want the finished product, but we don’t see all the ingredients or the method. And we don’t see the failed experiments along the way - the cake that didn’t rise, the burnt one, the scurry midway for alternative ingredients, the time we forgot to put in any sugar.

The Banyo Verge Garden Pilot Project was the cake that emerged out of our experimental kitchen. Like all good pilot projects, it tested assumptions, highlighted pitfalls, and confirmed the Shady Lanes model for collaborative verge garden projects.

Basic Ingredients - Cake or Chaos?

Here’s what you need for a basic cake.

• A council verge garden policy (or a council developing a policy as part of the process)

• At least one local champion who loves their community and has the energy and determination to make it happen

• A site that is available (the verge of the champion or local organisation)

• A community nursery for advice and supply of tubestock

• A social enterprise or similar if you want to include supported employment or training

• A local non-profit organisation or charity if you want to apply for funding

How hard can it be? Just put them together and you have a cake - or a gooey mess.

Different Levels of Collaborative Projects

You could start with a relatively simple group project like the ACF Community Brisbane Northside where members of the group convert their own verge gardens and leverage that to build their group and their skills for getting their message out. This requires little, if any, external funding and is a great training ground for change-making and collaborations.

These projects are where you can learn about:

1: Alignment of Participants

The key ingredient for collaborations is a shared purpose between participants, and that purpose must incorporate their individual aims so everybody wins. Your project must meet the council’s aims as well as your group and group members’ aims. And it must be good for nature.

My book, Garden on the Verge: A New Approach, reinforces this alignment between council and residents and nature that you need for any verge garden project, let alone a funded group project. This is also where you start building trust and relationships between diverse participants.

2: Innovation and Leverage

It’s hard to justify funding for incremental change that is just doing more of the same. What’s different about your project? Is it reaching or connecting new groups of people? Is it creating new models to get more done? Is it nurturing new skills and diverse networks? Does your group already have these skills or is it developing them as part of the project?

These skills are covered in my second book, currently at beta-reading stage. Once you develop this way of operating and its habits of thinking, you can apply them in many contexts.

3: Ongoing Sustainability

Will the project be self-sustaining when the funding runs out? For verge garden projects, that means every property owner or resident taking on the responsibility for ongoing maintenance is designed into the project. Even better, does it enable or build the foundation for further projects?

A More Elaborate Cake

Depending on your network, you could add other strands like:

• supported employment or training for the initial transition from grass to garden using an existing social enterprise or organisation. (like this)

• shaded and walkable streets on routes to schools, shops, near aged care residences (active transport, urban heat, equity, skin cancer)

• projects to reduce social isolation or sedentary lifestyles (preventative health)

• flood and extreme weather mitigation

Because our streets and verge gardens connect so much, the possibilities are only limited by your imagination and the diversity of your network. When you bring diverse participants together, you find that you have much more to work with.

But you still need that local buy-in and participation. It has to be community led.

Back to Moreton Bay

City of Moreton Bay is promoting the benefits of scaled verge gardens through group projects. The Our Healthy Environments Grants (OHEG) Program aims to facilitate this by encouraging community organisations (through grants of up to $50,000) to work with residents to deliver biodiverse verge gardens at the streetscape scale in locations in high urban heat areas that are within or adjacent to mapped ecological corridors. Applications for this round close on 31 March 2026.

Find out more on City of Moreton Bay’s website here

On Monday 16th March, the group will be holding their monthly Verge Visit and Casual Coffee at the Moreton Bay Demonstration Garden at Deception Bay.

I don’t live in that council area - I’m just over the border in Brisbane - but the ACF group covers all of northern Brisbane suburbs and Moreton Bay region. I’ll be there, so if you want to talk more about how we might draw on our networks to form a collaboration for a funded project, please come along.

My first book is available in Moreton Bay libraries but if you want to buy one, please buy online. To save postage, you can select Pick Up / Click and Collect and I’ll bring them on the 16th. Libraries can buy the book through their normal library distributors.

Let’s see what cakes we can make with the ingredients we have at hand.

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Jim’s Nursery Layer

Here’s a video of Jim describing his philosophy of working with nature to create what he calls the nursery layer as the first and most essential step to regeneration. It’s a respectful collaboration with nature. When the nursery layer has developed enough, bigger plants will germinate and thrive. Please take time to watch it.

The way Jim sees the nursery layer having a fundamental role in creating the biodiverse environment that enables the larger species to emerge and thrive is similar to the way the Shady Lanes Project aims to foster bigger and more diverse collaborations.

My Nursery Layer

We know that if we are to make the transition to a more sustainable future, we need collaborations across sectors and disciplines to address the complex and interlinking issues we face. But we struggle to move from ideas to making it happen in our messy world.

The Shady Lanes’ nursery layer is our verge gardens. That is the first collaboration described in the Guiding Principles, between Councils, Residents, and Nature. The quality of the relationships nurtured within that collaboration will determine the outcomes.

While every verge garden adds to the network of biodiversity and shade in our streets, it also adds to the network of people who are willing and able to collaborate in that messy space where innovation can germinate.

When that network is rich enough with active participants who have practiced diverse skills with this relatively simple collaboration at a hyperlocal level, it forms the nursery layer that nurtures bigger, more complex collaborations.

You can’t skip the nursery layer. You can’t read the theory and assume you know. Only by doing it will you develop the patience and confidence to start slow, hold back and let things brew and emerge. It’s an ongoing journey of observing, reflecting, and learning by doing.

Groups and Scale

When I started my verge garden, it was just me doing my thing, albeit working within council guidelines and working with nature. And that’s where most people stop. It doesn’t inspire everyone in the street to plant theirs. It doesn’t scale.

And just as nature’s nursery layer is made of the combination of plants, for scale we need groups of people sharing ideas, combining resources and knowledge, and compounding single efforts into group outcomes.

There is plenty of material here and elsewhere about going it alone as a verge gardener with advice on how and what to plant. I don’t need to add to that.

Now that I’ve researched and experimented and tested how to make it work for groups, it’s time for me to commit to writing the book that makes it faster and easier for people and organisations who want to use verge gardening to change their suburbs and cities and help that transition to a more sustainable future for all.

The Book

I’ve signed up with the Expert Author Community where I have access to another group with the skills and experience to help me make it happen.

For me, it’s another stage in the Shady Lanes journey. Daunting, but necessary. I want this book to be a useful tool for you, something that you can use to increase support and make changes in your organisations and communities.

How might this book help you get the changes you want in greening our streets and changing our cities?

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The first is the plan to build an Olympic Stadium on heritage-listed public land with fierce opposition from the Save Victoria Park campaign; the second is outrage at the Brisbane City Council’s refusal to give permission to put community batteries in parks. (news story: Brisbane city council blocks plans for fridge-sized community batteries due to loss of green space)

There is an overlap between supporters of the Save Victoria Park campaign and the critics of the Council’s refusal to permit the installation of the batteries in parks. From their viewpoint, the Lord Mayor’s support for the stadium and the Council refusing permission for the batteries are both inconsistent with Council claims to green credentials.

Watch the Language

The comments people make tell you a lot more than banal official announcements and cautious professional responses.

The recent announcement that the Stadium would be built in Victoria Park brought out off-hand comments from supporters about the land currently being “under-utilised”, only used by a few “NIMBYs” to walk their dogs. This displays a disregard or even blindness to all the everyday things that nature is doing that have a deeper and wider benefit to the entire city: biodiversity, habitat, shade, cooling, cleaning the air, rainwater management, etc.

Downplaying the impact with assurances that they aren’t taking all the greenspace, there’ll still be some left for the locals to walk their dogs, ignores the scale and urgent need to increase tree canopy and biodiversity in our city. It’s a narrow but common point of view in a society with a significant disconnect from nature.

Their view of legacy seems to be the things we build: stadiums, infrastructure, things to impress the visitors. “The Olympics” is the ultimate justification for overriding opposing views.

Their opponents from the Save Victoria Park is a surprisingly diverse group. They point out many reasons why the park should be protected and the original plan to regenerate the parklands to be continued. Nobody believes the Olympic takeover will be limited to this proposal. They too talk about legacy, but it is a less tangible legacy that involves history, nature, and community.

There are claims and counterclaims; we’re right and you’re wrong; our use of this land is more important than yours. It’s a stalemate, off to the courts to continue the adversarial battle.

Nobody is looking for collaborative discussions from which a more innovative solution could emerge. Nobody is asking what the world will be like in 2032? Or whether the Olympics may need to change to fit that world.

Like the people who want a stadium, the proponents of the community batteries need a site. They see parks as an obvious and available space for their batteries. The need for a transition to renewable energy is their justification for dismissing opposing views.

The reported comment in that news story, from the BCC Civic Cabinet Chair for Environment, Parks and Sustainability, that the Council does not support “plonking giant batteries in public parks” has been framed as the Council refusing to allow community batteries, ignoring the fact that the Council has approved batteries in road reserves, but not parks.

Manage Your Conversations Carefully

The conversations I am seeing around the batteries and Victoria Park are very similar to those surrounding verge garden disputes. Hostility snowballs, especially when fed by keyboard warriors and partisan campaigns, and everyone is stuck in their opposing views. In the end, the most powerful party will determine what happens but nobody really wins and wounds never heal.

The habits of open-minded conversations with diverse viewpoints, finding a common shared purpose, and coming up with collaborative solutions, is something that you can learn in group verge projects. From there, you can use the skills and insights for all sorts of contentious issues to find better solutions.

Understanding The Space Matters

Who owns this land, and what is affected by what I do? Who has responsibility for ongoing maintenance and insurance? Who deals with things when something goes wrong? How does it fit within the larger context of the street and city?

Read more about this at Understanding The Space.

A road reserve, which includes the verges, is a very contested space, but it also provides access to maintenance vehicles and emergency services. I can see why having the batteries on road reserves could avoid a lot of logistical issues compared to having them in a park - much like all the other power and communication boxes in our streets.

However, putting your battery on the road reserve means working with other users and uses of the space, and affects the way that residents see their streets. Is plonking the batteries in the park a way for local residents to have their batteries while keeping them well out of sight?

Look for the Valid Reasons Behind the Restrictions

This is where guerrilla gardening, railing against council guidelines without thinking about what’s behind them and why they might be justified, fails.

If there are restrictions you don’t like, or people disagree with your proposal, it doesn’t mean that one of you is right and the other wrong. It means that you need to work harder to find a better solution.

What happens if something goes wrong? While the idea of a battery might seem to take little greenspace, especially if you put it on a pole, how does access to the space for installation, maintenance, and replacement work? How do you reduce risk if there was a fire?

If you are the proponent, don’t expect other people to find your solutions for you. Engage positively with other views, ask the sort of questions that open up the conversation, and you might come up with a better collaborative solution than you could do alone.

More reading

Affirmative Inquiry to find a common purpose and better solutions

Who are the villians in your stories?

Where are your conversations taking you?

Regen Brisbane

This article was inspired by a conversation at . If you want to talk more about Victoria Park or the community battery issue, you can join in there.

Disclosure: I don’t support the plonking of batteries in parks and I don’t support the plonking of a stadium in Victoria Park. I think both need open and imaginative conversations with more diverse and creative groups to find better answers. What do you think?

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Of course, any single action and any single verge garden in itself will barely make a dent in the complex problems we face. But every bit makes a difference, and the more bits the better. More importantly, nurturing even a tiny patch of land, seeing the results when we work with nature to increase biodiversity and habitat, helps maintains the hope that we humans can get our act together and the motivation to do our tiny bit.

Activists say that action breeds hope. I’d qualify that to say that a series of strategic actions: starting with what we’ve got; doing what’s doable with the resources at hand; choosing actions that take us towards our long-term aims, are what is needed to maintain enough hope and energy to keep going.

It’s what we do around that activity of verge gardening, and how we use that to build the assets, skills, and networks needed to do much bigger things that makes the big difference. That’s what Shady Lanes is about - not just the single act of gardening on one verge but how we leverage it into the bigger picture of creating a better future.

Or as someone once sang: ‘Tain't What You Do (It's The Way That Cha Do It)

Making Local Connections - On The Verge

Yesterday, I was delighted to get an update from Jim Williams about his verge garden.

Almost three years ago, the Urban Forest team who administer the Brisbane City Council (BCC) verge garden policy passed on my contact details (with permission), and Jim phoned me to complete the triangle. Jim wrote a story about the beginnings of his verge garden, including why and how he was doing it.

Then, a few months ago, the BCC Catchment officers organised an event with bushcare groups from different sides of the city and Jim and I met in person for the first time. Another triangle! That’s when I asked for the update on his verge garden.

Completing these triangles by introducing people who might share an interest, or holding targeted events that bring people together, is an essential part of building open collaborative networks.

Everybody wins and new assets are created. This is regenerative growth and abundance, helping BCC increase their tree canopy and biodiversity targets, and helping Jim and me in our respective endeavours. We are all working in the same direction and although our goals, circumstances, and skills differ, we have a common purpose of working with nature and each other to increase natural habitat and biodiversity.

Check out Jim’s garden at the beginning in 2022, A Bush Block Verge - A Work in Progress, and now in 2024.

Making Global Connections

Earlier this month, I took part in the online day of Global Donut Days 2024 which had the theme: “local action, global connection”. Our presentation was a collaboration between Kyungmin in South Korea, me in Brisbane, Ed Morrison in the USA, and the Doughnut Economics Action Lab (DEAL) team in the UK.

How do we make those connections? The same way we make connections with verge gardens: first by doing small public local actions that show who we are and what we care about. Then we talk publicly about what we are doing so we can all follow trails and close triangles to build more connections and networks.

The DEAL site acts as a hub or node to bring people together, thereby creating the potential for creating triangles. in South Korea followed the trail through the DEAL website in the UK to read about Regen Brisbane and contacted me in Australia. Used this way, the internet is like the verge: a common space where you can put out your public signpost and invite people to engage in conversation.

The thing that draws me to Doughnut Economics is that it forces us to look at the interlinked nature of the issues we face. Put simply, we need to stay within the planetary boundaries while trying to address the multiple Sustainable Development Goals.

“To meet the needs of all people within the means of the living planet”

Even our smallest projects can contribute towards that one shared purpose.

That means creating loose networks to nurture collaborations with people from all walks of life with that overarching purpose in common. It means making connections between diverse people, across sectors and disciplines. What better and more accessible place to learn and practice that than on the verge where all those different users and uses come crashing together?

Kyungmin and I will be doing a similar presentation at the South-East Asia Strategic Doing Hub on December 5^th on Combining Doughnut Economics and Strategic Doing to nurture local action and a global network. It’s free to join, bring your curiosity and questions.

Connecting With You

How do you make new connections? Do you have public signposts for people to find you and your group: a verge garden, a profile on DEAL, a Linkedin page, a blog or Substack?

Do you check the likes and comments of posts to find others who share your interests and engage with them?

Let us all know what you do, and why, in the comments - you never know who you will meet up with.

If you just read this and move on, you’ll never know what opportunities you missed to make some triangles.

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Read More:

• Recording of the session for Global Donut Days 2024

• Slides from the presentation

But how do you increase density when so many people resist that change?

Regardless of what planners might recommend, politicians will do what’s politically possible, easy, or advantageous. While greenfield development and low-density suburbs is what is easiest politically, that is what we’ll get, regardless of the environmental and social consequences.

Residents in my suburb campaign tirelessly against townhouses and anything different to the detached house on a suburban block. While those houses get bigger and the blocks get smaller, that expectation of a separation between buildings and the ideal of the Australian backyard, often with a swimming pool, remains strong.

Your House is Your Castle

Looking out from your home to the street, or from the street to your home, the verge is like an apron (or moat!) to your property and not very important in its own right. Your property is what really matters. That’s where you live, where you invest your time and money, and how you show what you’re made of.

Everything you do inside the fence, improving and maintaining your house and garden, is a personal and financial investment for you and your family.

Hopefully, your neighbours will do the same and reinforce the character of your suburb. You don’t want to be the one that lets the street down. And you probably don’t want new homes built that are too different to yours.

A Change of Viewpoint

I often talk about verge gardens and street trees being our long paddock of biodiversity threading through our suburbs. It adds up to a massive amount of land that could be cooling our cities, increasing rainwater infiltration, increasing habitat, and providing many other environmental benefits.

Go out and stand on the footpath in the middle of a verge garden and turn 90 degrees - looking up the street. Walk to the corner, turn and come back, past your home to the next corner, and back again.

The focus here is on the path and the street. This is no longer just a place for cars where we drive to and from our houses. The buildings are not so important now. It makes little difference if they are big, small, detached, terraces, townhouses, or units.

Time and money invested in this public space is an investment in our community. This is not my verge garden, it’s part of the communal pathway that goes past my home. It’s public land, where anyone can wander as they like, perhaps saying hello as they pass or stop for a chat.

It becomes a place for conversations. Some are conversations about the street, what sort of streets we want to live in, what the streets are like now and what they could be.

If you an advocate for change in the design of our cities and transport systems, this is your chance to show how your ideas for change are an improvement on what we have now.

Goodbye to the Backyard

Once we start seeing our streets as places of activity, places for people of all ages to walk and talk and meet and play, and a place where we can all connect with nature, the need for large private gardens diminishes.

A few, like me, will value their private garden and create a biodiverse oasis for wildlife, but many people these days don’t want a large private garden to maintain.

A garden that is all decking and paving and fake grass does nothing for nature and nothing to cool our cities. Neat lawn and hedges for show is not much better, and paying someone to do this high-maintenance, extractive style of gardening is a large expense for homeowners. It’s also a waste of land that could be housing people or regenerating the natural environment.

Transport Alternatives

This change in the way we view our streets opens the discussion on transport and the relative priority given to driving and parking, riding bikes, and walking. If we want people to have fewer, smaller cars in order to address environmental issues, people need to be able to get where they need to go walking, cycling, and on public transport.

More than that, it needs to be a more attractive option to getting in the car. Streets need to be shady and interesting, with paths that are wide enough and safe from trip hazards. Even better, these streets present opportunities for social interaction and getting to know your neighbourhood.

Making Increasing Density Attractive

If we tell people that the design of our cities needs to change, and back it up with lots of facts and arguments about why they ought to accept this change, can we really expect them to say: Oh yes, you’re right, we’ll do exactly that.

We are all emotional creatures, even though some of us kid ourselves that we are very logical. At most, we have learned to moderate our emotional responses with reasoning.

We all have instrinsic values: values that we will go to any length to defend. These can include freedom, independence, autonomy, equity, and safety. We can crave acceptance or validation, a sense of belonging, of status in the eyes of ourselves or others.

But we rarely think or talk about these values.

Instead, we use things to represent our values. This is a process called reification, whereby a house or car become symbols for underlying values. Look at advertisements for cars and you quickly see they are not information about the actual vehicles but instead hook into the values (e.g. freedom, status, autonomy, identity) that potential purchasers might attach to them.

Housing is even more varied, look at the myriad of metaphors we use to describe the places we, and others, live: castle, nest, refuge, den, home, homestead, palace, flat, apartment, slum, dwelling, townhouse, flophouse, cottage, shelter, investment, property, mansion, McMansion, manor, hovel, family home, bachelor pad, lodgings, accommodation, and so on.

When we have these arguments about changing our suburbs, and draw the battlelines between the NIMBY’s and YIMBY’s, it doesn’t always mean that our values clash. It can just be the different things that have come to represent values that we share.

Any surface arguments about changes to urban design and increasing density are underpinned by a swirling mess of competing and unexamined associations with diverse individual values. You might think you are talking about the same thing but one of you is talking about equity and the other is talking about safety. These arguments will lead nowhere, entrenching division. No amount of surface level information and logical reasoning will change that.   

Changing the Conversation

It’s easier to be dispassionate and see what’s happening when you aren’t one of the combatants. You’ve nothing at risk, nothing to gain, lose, or defend.

For the people affected, we need to find common ground, not threaten to take away the symbols of their values. This is the work of mediators, storytellers, and innovative change-makers.

If we want people to stop defending something that they value, we need to realise what we are asking of them, and then to offer them a view of something that is at least as good and preferably better to meet that need.

And it has to be show, not tell. Create images that help people imagine what something better might look like. Explore what that better future could be. Both sides might be surprised at the valuable ideas the other parties contribute.

If we cede that ground to advertisers and populist politicians, we won’t achieve any of the changes we need to create a more sustainable world.

This is the stuff of diverse collaboration. It’s not the safe teamwork of like-minds brainstorming. It’s messy and risky and creative. It means dropping the mantle of expert who provides answers and instead embarking on a journey of open curiosity and exploration where everyone brings varying and sometimes unpredictable expertise and ideas to the table.

Forget the Answers: Start with Better Questions

We all have our preferred answers, based on a mix of research and life experiences. But these are wicked problems with many interlinked parts, where there is no one answer.

Questions can open up new and creative ideas and options, pushing for answers close it down.

Let’s take a step back and find questions that we can all agree on to start some more fruitful and exploratory conversations: Something along the lines of:

How could we ensure that everyone in our region has adequate secure shelter with access to work, study, food, and services as part of a sustainable future of our region?

or

How could we ensure that essential workers can live with their families close enough to access their workplaces by affordable public transport?

or

How could we ensure that not being able to fund or drive a private car does not remove the independence and autonomy of people?

What would that future look like?

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