A short story

On one hand, my practice is unruly, feral even. On the other, it's laser focused. I'm endlessly fascinated by the ways humans relate to the living world, and how these relations are expressed through language.

Georgina means 'earth worker'. My creative practice begins and ends with words and dirt. In between, I roam.

A longer story

1998: My publishing career begins with a self-initiated holiday project titled Fungi in which I document, on stapled-together scraps of exercise paper, the wonders of the fungal kingdom. It is not a bestseller.

1999-2001: I study a Bachelor of Communications, majoring in journalism. I am uncommitted to the practice of journalism, but I learn how to craft clear, succinct prose.

Photo: Daniel Shipp

2004: I enrol in a Diploma of Horticulture and landscape design and swiftly fall in love with plants, gardens, design.

2006-2013: I work as a designer at two Sydney-based landscape architecture studios before starting my own residential landscape design practice in 2011. Writing for design and lifestyle publications on the side, I quickly realise two things: I love writing, and what I want to write about — the why, not the how — has no home in the existing design publishing landscape.

2013: I launch an online publication called The Planthunter. It grows an international audience at a weedy speed. 

2018: I release The Planthunter: Truth, Beauty, Chaos and Plants (Thames and Hudson, Timber Press 2019). I never wanted to make an illustrated book, yet I make an illustrated book. The cover is a disaster.

2020: I launch a print publication called Wonderground alongside The Planthunter online magazine. The journal is stocked in over 60 stores internationally and each issue sells over 2000 copies.

2021: The Planthunter becomes Wonderground. I've never been a hunter of plants, and I'm not keen on romanticising imperial botanical plunder.

2023: Sales of the print journal increase. People are reading and sharing and saying nice things. I collapse. Too many years of trying to do too many things at once: Publisher, editor, writer, fundraiser, marketer, distributor. A gear shift is suggested, a PhD. An opportunity to deepen my earth-working practices.

2026: I'm mid-way through a PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, where I also teach. My research asks what it might mean to write with a river landscape rather than about it — to treat writing itself as an ethical, expressive design practice. Dyarubbin shapes the words.