Heartscapes strengthens and connects urban communities of humans, fauna, flora and fungi through regeneration and conservation.
We are scaling the power of street gardening and supporting local ecosystems, joyfully transforming barren patches of land in the city into gardens of buzzing, wriggling beauty. Positive education and engagement is infused into every facet of our work.
The problem we are addressing is human disconnection to nature. Cities have always been designed to be separate to nature and this disconnection is a root cause of the polycrisis we are currently facing right now - which includes the biodiversity crisis, mental health crisis, isolation crisis and climate crisis.
Through bringing care and nature into public realm and scaling the work, we are demonstrating how public realm can be designed, used and managed while empowering and inspiring individuals, families and communities all over the world to create their own positive change.
Watch our 4-minute film…
Entirely created with and by the community in 2021, this wonderful 4 minute film on The Heart Gardening Project (our old name!) was made with the incredible support of Mezzanine Films and director Brendan Maher. Though we have grown up as an organisation and stories have moved forward, we still absolutely love this film and it still encapsulates what we are all about!
Our vision…
To heal humankind by creating biodiversity and saving ecosystems in our cities.
Our mission…
To connect humans to humans, humans to nature and nature to nature.
How Heartscapes began…
Emma Cutting (our Founder) started street gardening in 2016 and many life-long threads, experiences and challenges led Emma to create Heartscapes in 2021 and also design the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor between 2020-2022.
Emma knows full well the power of having access to nature. Growing up on a farm in northern NSW where land was being regenerated, nature was her safe space. Later, in her 20s and 30s, she had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for 12 years and didn’t have access to nature. This stark comparison between having access to nature and not for such long periods of time shaped how Emma wanted to live her life and how she wanted to bring up her daughter.
Being a piano teacher, Emma was also experiencing the ecological/climate anxiety of the next generation and she knew she needed to put planet over piano to demonstrate to the next generation that people are willing to take action - take risks - to create positive systemic change. To create hope.
Other factors that led her to this work include…
her education which encouraged her think out of the box and ask questions
the feeling she couldn’t shake around the earth being smothered in concrete and tarmac
the calls to action by world leaders like Sir David Attenborough and Robin Wall Kimmerer
experiencing the immense power of street gardening for herself which helped her mental health, physical health and connection to the community and the land
the lack of government action being taken in the city around her to heal the many empty barren undernourished pieces of land
In 2020, when council challenges at the first larger site forced Emma to stop works for a few months, she decided to cast her net much wider and create more gardens in surrounding streets to increase the resilience and power of the work.
Experiencing both the community joy and positivity radiate from these initial garden sites as well as the immense impact the gardens were having on surrounding wildlife meant that for Emma it was an absolute no-brainer that this work be scaled even further - locally, around the country and around the world!
This was the start of Heartscapes…and we continue to grow many years on!
(Learn more about our main project the Melbourne Pollinator Corridor and our world-first online street gardening course)