Fringe lily (Thysanotus tuberosus) at Fair Food and Wildflowers

Hybrid butternut and jap pumpkins growing up an old children’s swing in Sunita Joshi’s garden, Naarm

Fair Food and Wildflowers is a small space and currently tended by Brontë + sometimes Nelly, Leah, Jemma, Aimee, and Lachie. The shop is set within a meadow garden featuring indigenous and introduced plants. The shop itself is the Old Storehouse for the Avenel Dairy. With friends it has been restored to a beautiful new space to store and distribute food.

Brontë is quiet online, but appreciates that some background information is probably of interest. She’s generally in the garden. Fair Food & Wildflowers is where her love for growing, food security, and caring for her home, on Taungurung Grey Box Grassy Woodland, intertwine. She has a degree in nutrition and a Masters in environmental restoration. She has worked researching the experience of food insecurity among people seeking asylum, as well as among people accessing food charity in Victoria. When not at the store she is at Euroa Arboretum tending the grounds and the little plants.

Fair Food and Wildflowers recognises that food production and the health of native ecosystems are inherently linked, and seeks to explore how we might manage them together for human and environmental health. We offer a space to trial new ways of being that perhaps might feel right during a time shaped by climate change, biodiversity loss, social inequality and discrimination.

We hope to create a space in-between: between our current socioecological state, and a place with more tenderness, attention to detail, and reciprocity with each other and the environment. Space allows creativity to emerge, and that creativity is critical to our mutual flourishing.

Brontë harvesting Babaco at Melbourne Uni Community Garden.