June 3rd, 2026The Productive Garden Companion
Natasha Morgan was approached last year by Murdoch Books and this year, The Productive Garden Companion, the book she had hoped to find her entire life, was created. She chatted to Kyle Barnes.
Kyle: How did it all come about?
Natasha: They had seen one of my posts on Instagram and out of the blue one day, I got this email that said, I’ve long thought about you for a book. The publisher had used Spargo Creek as a location for a couple of book shoots so I was in the periphery. Anyway, (the email) was all about my productive garden workshop. She asked if could write about how gardens are beautiful and abundant, but they’re also about being inhabited. So I said yes, I could do a book.
Kyle: Had you been asked before?
Natasha: Yes, a lot of people had said to me in the past I should write a book. I had worked as a professional landscape architect for many years at a super-high level on projects like the Australian Garden at the Cranbourne Botanic Gardens for a long time. And I’d done Spargo Creek with Oak and Monkey Puzzle. And now this one at Daylesford, which is all about re-imagining everything that I could have done at Oak and Monkey Puzzle, but on a residential block. It felt like a good time for me.
Kyle: What did you want this to be about?
Natasha: I really wanted this book to be something that I couldn’t find. A lot of the books out there in the gardening and design world are full of information but they’re not terribly inspiring. They’re often really daggy books, a bit dense on information. And then the books that are super inspiring, the design books, full of beautiful imagery, are lacking substance. I’ve been gardening since I was a kid, but I’m also a landscape architect. So I thought how can I bring those two together and use the two properties as a case study? The book is all about productive gardens and what a productive garden means to me.
Kyle: What does that mean to you?
Natasha: Everything from our traditional sense of fruit, veg, herbs…but also for me, it’s flowers, medicinals and then this broader idea of what productive means which is healing and mental health and mindfulness. That’s what my gardens give me and why I always return to them. Also it’s about biodiversity and sustainability and resilience. Even during the course of the book, my definition of productive has evolved.
Kyle: And you help people find their way?
Natasha: Yes, it’s also got all of those high-level design skills, teaching people how to see the opportunities and also to unpack the way in which they want to inhabit their gardens and how they design for that. It’s has 24 contributors from around the world who are exceptional people in their own right. People like Charles Dowding in the UK and the story of a beautiful woman in Ukraine who is gardening in a war zone and she’s literally saving the seeds from her fourth-generation garden and selling them around the world to support them to survive the war. A productive garden that’s beautiful is not always a luxury because as human beings, you know, beauty is a necessity.
Kyle: It sounds very inspiring.
Natasha: It’s also a bit of a call to action. The end of the book finishes with a call to action to consider what would happen if everybody just grew one thing. If everybody learned to grow one thing and we swapped and traded and shared, or whether you just had the incredible contentment of knowing that you could grow one thing that you couldn’t grow before, what would that world be like?
Kyle: It’s an amazing story. A life passion?
Natasha: Yes. I learned gardening as a kid just by sticking my hands in the soil. No one told me how to do it. I was just curious and I learned by doing it that way. And I think that is what the book encourages people to do as well, just give things a go. Even if you start with one seed or one square metre of garden or a pot on a balcony, everything that’s in the book applies to any scale and any location. That was my ambition from the outset, to make sure that it was those fundamental things about growing – and how growing has supported a way of life for me too.
Pre-order The Productive Garden Companion at www.geni.us/productivegarden Image: Emily Weaving
