THE INCREDIBLE EDIBLE OASIS

When Kylie and Steve Stapleton decided to turn their garden in Brisbane’s northern suburbs into an edible forest, one of the first trees they planted was carambola, also known as starfruit — so naturally they named their little piece of paradise The Green Carambola.

The Southeast Asian native isn’t the only tropical exotic growing in profusion on their 612sqm block. There’s also black sapote — a South American persimmon sometimes called chocolate pudding fruit — and New Guinea bean, which is neither from New Guinea nor a bean but a vigorous African climber that produces a long, pale-green gourd somewhere between a squash and a zucchini.

This so-called bottle gourd, a