Karen Sutherland has come a long way since planting her first garden in the clay soil of Shepparton as an eight-year-old.
Hold tight - we’re checking permissions before loading more content
“(My family) said `oh, okay, whatever you like, off you go’,” she said.
“And I did — I dug it up and it was really hard, rocky ground ... I don’t know what I was thinking but I pretty much have grown my own vegies ever since then.”
For more than 10 years, permaculture expert Ms Sutherland has helped share her lifelong knowledge of gardening and food practice through her business, Edible Eden Design.
Edible Eden has designed and constructed countless edible plant displays, from native food exhibits for Seymour Alternative Farming Expo to a life-sized tractor covered in 3000 edible plants for a Moomba float.
Ms Sutherland has also designed countless landscape and bush gardens for private homes, schools and businesses.
“I started doing it as a child because my grandfather was an orchardist and vegie grower,” she said.
“I loved traipsing around after him, and just kind of absorbed those genes.
“I inherited the love.”
After a long and fruitful career in Melbourne, Ms Sutherland relocated back to Cosgrove to help care for her parents a few months ago.
Her home in Melbourne, Gunyah Gardens, is home to more than 200 edible and useful plants, where she would often host open gardens and tours of her sprawling plantings.
While in Melbourne she could grow almost anything, Ms Sutherland loves the challenge of dealing with different climates and plant varieties.
“I have fruit all year round because I grow really unusual species,” she said.
“It’s an experiment to see how things go.”
Her advice to budding permaculturists?
“Have more flowers,” she said.
“People used to be very serious, they didn’t want anything they weren’t going to eat directly.
“But gradually, people are accepting more diversity in their gardens.”
In a climate like that of Greater Shepparton, Ms Sutherland said gardeners needed to ensure they had adequate protection from cabbage moths and birds, and also from the climate.
“People say, `I just want to have a food forest garden’ — but you’ve got to have protective structures,” she said.
“It’s also important to provide the shade here in summer, because things just get fried.”
She recommended white mesh or a light shade cloth over vegies for insect and sun protection, and structures — whether they be metal hoops or plastic irrigation pipes — that could be used to place mesh or remove it as needed.
Ms Sutherland also encouraged gardeners to buy a large range of dwarf fruit trees that can provide produce across the year.
“Look for those obscure plants that people don’t think of as often,” she said.
“For one thing, you’re being able to eat as much as possible from your garden but you’re also getting a diversity of nutrition.”
A perennial kitchen garden completed at William Angliss Institute in Melbourne five years ago was one project Ms Sutherland will not forget.
She propagated more than 100 plants including many Australian natives at the school — which now grow with little to no special maintenance.
“It’s got lemon myrtle, thriving finger limes, native sage, thyme, cinnamon myrtle,” Ms Sutherland said.
Her coup de grâce was a “nasty little brick bit” with awful airconditioning vents, where she was told nothing would be able to thrive.
“I put in a banana, a coffee plant, buddha's hand — and now the bananas fruit every year, and they get coffee beans,” she said.
“They loved it because they said nothing’s going to grow in there, and all I could see was opportunity.
“I see less than perfect gardening situations and see it as, well, no problem, it’s a challenge to find plants that are going to work there.”
For Ms Sutherland, there is nothing more heartening than putting in a garden and then seeing people blossom into keen gardeners.
“It’s extremely rewarding,” she said.
“You get to become really good friends with the people, and continue that friendship over many years.”
Cadet journalist