Take a glance around most of the gardens in Perth and you will start to notice a lot of the same plants popping up again and again.
There’s Red Cottonwood, which is a kind of Hibiscus with dark purple leaves and cream-coloured flowers.
There are white Magnolias, spiky Agaves, Chalk Stick plants and, of course, the near-ubiquitous Frangipani.
Again and again these plants populate our gardens and, while I have nothing against them, the time has come to point out their one glaring inadequacy: you can’t eat them!!!
If aliens ever visited Earth, they would be aghast at the irrationality of our behaviour.
We fill the soil outside our homes with plants that would poison us if we so much as nibbled them, then, every few days, we hop in our petrol-guzzling, CO2 emitting tin cans and pootle off to supermarkets stacked with fruits and vegetables that have been grown by people we’ve never met — sometimes on the other side of the planet — and shipped in for us to eat.
Mike Hulme is not an alien, but he is suitably aghast.
And, happily, there is nothing irrational about the formal permaculture garden he grows with his wife Michelle Sheridan.
It’s bursting with food.
“Productive plants have always been our thing,” Mike explains, as we stand in his sun-drenched front yard.
At first glance, you may not realise that almost everything in Mike and Michelle’s garden is edible.
The neatly trimmed Feijoa hedges, artfully pruned fig trees, Manzanillo olives and creeping thyme that grows in gaps between the front pathway give the garden a stylish Mediterranean feel.
Look closer, and you notice an abundance of edible plants that are hardy, delicious, and perfectly suited to our climate.
“The thing I love about Perth is that you can grow a pawpaw from the tropics next to an apple from Russia,” Mike says, eating a freshly plucked fig.
“I don’t understand why more people don’t do it — it’s the most beautiful produce”.
A lifetime gardener and creator of the Witchcliffe Ecovillage, Mike’s garden is, unsurprisingly, filled with the best and most interesting range of edibles.
There are macadamia trees, a Hick’s mulberry, an Old English mulberry, a Vasilika Fig, a black Genoa fig, red cherry guavas, pomegranates, Barbados cherries, pawpaws, Carmen Hass avocados, cumquats, navel ranges, Tahitian limes, dragon fruits, pink grapefruits, lemongrass, Blue Java bananas, finger limes, dwarf peaches and a lemon verbena.
All have been planted in and around formal limestone edging in keeping with their federation-style house, which has been restored and outfitted with solar panels and a solar hot water system, making it completely self-sufficient with renewable energy.
“Because of the federation style of the house, we needed to create a formal garden, but it had to be a wild and edible one too,” Mike explains.
Their mission accomplished, Mike and Michelle’s garden is an example more West Australians must follow.
When a sustainable, year-round veggie buffet is within reach, we should all aim to have our garden and eat it, too.