Funnily enough, I feel like this in a tonne of areas of my life too. When I have a lapse in exercise and totally stop doing anything, the idea of beginning again feels impossible. When I stop posting about my business online, starting again feels clunky and gross. I’ve currently completely stopped reading books, which is so annoyingly stupid of me because I know full well that reading makes me happy, but once our kids are asleep I just can’t seem to muster the will to lift one up to my face and read.

For whatever reason, I don’t feel this way in the garden anymore - although I used to. I used to feel exactly the same in the garden - to have periods where I just didn’t like it very much, and didn’t really feel like doing anything out there. Over the years, almost unconsciously, I’ve found little ways to hack my brain - things that will always reliably give me joy in the garden, and bring my motivation back. Today’s newsletter is a list of those things.

Don’t feel like gardening?

In my experience, the biggest impediment to gardening isn’t usually the state of the garden, but the mental state of the person growing it. Overwhelm and confusion tend to sap motivation faster than any actual planting or landscaping issues. And these are feelings that afflict even the best, most seasoned gardeners.

The trick, I’ve found, to allowing your garden to pull you back in is to determinedly ignore all of the overwhelming work that you don’t want to do, all the jobs and worries, uncertainties and self-criticisms. Forget about all that! That is not your problem to deal with today. Your first job is to simply break the inertia, and to do that, experience tells me, you need only do one thing: anything at all. As long as it is fun.

Here are five of my favourite ways to burn through beginners’ inertia and just get started. Do one, do them all. They are simple and inherently enjoyable, and they will remind you exactly why you want to grow yourself a garden (and then you can get on with the more effortful business of doing just that).

Note: Today’s newsletter is a preview from the book I am writing, which is all about growing a resilient and beautiful garden in Perth. This is from Chapter 5 :)

Below the paywall you’ll find:

• A list of my favourite summer bulbs to plant in Perth

• How to choose your first tree, and where to put it

• A morning habit that made me a much better and happier gardener

• Why too many of us start our gardens back to front

• A simple trick for decluttering an overwhelmingly chaotic garden

To read along with the book as I write it, you can become a paying subscriber via the button below:

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Plant a single pot of bulbs

If there is one hill I will die on it is that absolutely everybody needs at least one pot of spring bulbs in their life. If you have never grown yourself a pot of bulbs, I can appreciate that it might not feel like an especially life changing thing to do. But it is.

A single pot of bulbs is the gateway drug to gardening and I am its biggest pusher.

A single pot of bulbs proves that gardening can be simple and still work. You need a small terracotta pot, you need bulbs that like growing in Perth, and you need some good quality potting mix (don’t scrimp on the soil).

Fill the pot halfway with soil, put the bulbs in, add more soil – you’re done. Put it in the sun and keep it watered. There is no one who cannot do this, and unlike a lot of ‘easy’ gardening projects that are aimed at beginners and that don’t actually work, a seasoned gardener is doing this the exact same way as a beginner.

It’s easy and quick to do, but this little pot also does something else that is much more important: it changes how you think. It shows you, with its painfully slow growth, that forces exist outside of your day-to-day life that will continue, whether you’ve had a good day or bad.

It teaches you to pay attention to these infinitesimal changes, to revel in them, and it inspires hope. On the murkiest, most miserable days, when everything is going wrong, your little pot will be there, green shoots pushing doggedly upwards, carrying with them the promise of blooms. I’m not wistful! I’m right! And I’ve yet to meet a single person who has planted themselves a pot of bulbs and failed to delight in them.

And it just so happens that now is your very last opportunity to get summer bulbs in the ground. In fact, it’s a kind of genius moment to plant summer bulbs, because you’ll usually find them already sprouting and on sale in garden centres (and online). There’s nothing wrong with these bulbs, you can still bung them in and they should still bloom just fine. I got myself a garden full of lilies on the cheap doing this last year, and they’re all popping up again now!

Go for bulbs that like Perth and naturalise readily in our gardens (so you don’t have to dig them up every winter). My three favourites are:

• Gladioli

• Lilies

• Hippeastrums

You can also find a big list of all my favourite summer bulbs for Perth here:

And that is the last reason that bulbs (and gardening in general) are so wonderful: they hold you accountable to timelines that exist outside of you – they demand you take action during discrete windows that close with the seasons. If you want bulbs in summer, you must plant them in late winter/early spring, whatever else may be going on in your life. I have heard people say in the depths of grief, or the razor edge of anxiety, they still found themselves out in the garden, for the simple reason that something needed to be planted before the window closed. The hardest step, as my grandad always said, is the first one out the door. The plants you grow force that step, and reward you with hope, beauty, and (I think) a life that is changed, ever-so-slightly, for the better.

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In my experience, people either neglect their soil (and their plants die), or they busy themselves with a handful of jobs that may seem essential but actually do very little, or even sometimes make soil health worse! In last week’s newsletter, we took a deep dive into exactly what makes Perth’s soil such a challenge (and how you can fix it, with just a few amendments).

In this week’s newsletter, I am outlining all the other things you no longer need to bother with when it comes to the soil in your garden. I hope it will help make you a lazier, happier and more successful gardener!

Note: Today’s newsletter is a preview from the book I am writing, which is all about growing a resilient and beautiful garden in Perth. This is from Chapter 3 :)

Below the paywall you’ll find:

• How to improve your soil if your garden beds are already full of plants

• Why I avoid synthetic fertilisers and soil wetters

• Why I (almost) never bother weeding

• Why you should hang onto your garden waste

• A very simple recipe for soil improvement

• How to keep your soil from turning back to sand once you’ve improved it

• Advice on soil improvement for those growing Australian natives

To read along with the book as I write it, you can become a paying subscriber via the button below:

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Ok. Here are some of the most common ways people fuss around with the soil in their gardens, why they are a waste of time, and why you can forget about them.

Digging the soil to ‘aerate it’

It’s a common misconception that good gardeners dig their soil. This is a perfect example of how working harder makes things worse.

I already mentioned one kind of fungi that live in your soil helping to make nutrients available for your plants. There are other kinds of helpful fungi that create delicate networks around your plants’ roots. These fungi have a reciprocal arrangement with the plants they surround; they feed off some of the sugars in the plant, and in turn, help the plant access more phosphorus (one of the key nutrients plants need to grow) from the soil. Digging and turning the soil damages all of these good fungi and breaks their delicate networks apart.

Soil that is left untouched and unbroken also develops tiny tunnels and passages from all the little animals moving through it. These tunnels hold small pockets of air which provide oxygen for all the animals in the soil, as well as for the plants themselves (plant roots respire and need oxygen just like we do!). Digging destroys these tunnels and reduces the soil’s oxygen holding capacity. The irony is that the whole idea of digging to aerate and ‘fluff-up’ soil is an export from places with truly heavy, clay-based soils that are easily compacted. It doesn’t actually help there either, but in sandy Perth, compacted soils are a problem we rarely have to deal with in the first place. So not only does digging fail to solve a problem we don’t even have, but it also makes a whole bunch of other things worse.

There are so many more reasons not to bother digging your soil – it can break up plants’ root systems, reduce your soil’s ability to hold onto water, bring weed seeds up to the surface of the soil, giving you more weeds to deal with, and – I’m sorry to say – the earthworms you cut in half do not, in fact, survive and turn into two worms. As with so many aspects of gardening, I find myself again in the peculiar position of trying hard to convince gardeners to do less, to be lazier, to take a load off. Digging your soil is, put plainly, work you just don’t have to do.

Pour yourself a G&T. Stop digging your garden beds.

How to improve your soil if your beds are already planted

If I’m not digging my garden beds, I hear you ask, how am I supposed to add the clay, manure and mulch?

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I don’t remember exactly when I realised that the most important part of growing a healthy garden in Perth was taking care of the soil. But I do remember my Mum once telling me about a friend of hers who had achieved the unimaginable: a Perth garden that harboured earthworms.

My Mum told me her friend had put decades of effort into building up her soil, that her backyard was like a square oasis cut out of our otherwise parched and sandy state. I wanted what she had, but I couldn’t fathom how she had achieved this improbable sorcery. I still don’t actually know exactly what this woman did in her garden, although I’d bet good money it is pretty similar to what I now do, and what I’ll teach you to do. It doesn’t take decades, and it isn’t sorcery. What has most surprised me is discovering how incredibly simple soil improvement is, and just how overcomplicated and inefficient it has been made by the swill of garden amendments and products you simply do not need.

Note: Today’s newsletter is a preview from the book I am writing, which is all about growing a resilient and beautiful garden in Perth. This is from Chapter 3 - everything you need to know about Perth’s sandy, water repellant soil, and how to fix it.

To read along with the book as I write it, you can become a paying subscriber via the button below:

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If you want to learn even more about fixing Perth soil, including all the practical things to do and add (plus the local products to buy and how to apply them), I have written a book on exactly that subject. It also comes with a 12-minute video where I demonstrate exactly how I improve my own garden beds. It makes soil improvement simple, no-fuss and it actually works. You can check it out here.

Ok. So here is the short version: If you want to improve Perth soil so that you can grow jungle plants, fruit trees, ornamental trees, vegetables, flowers and any other non-natives, you need three things: clay, animal manure and lupin mulch (you can also use pea straw, but I like lupin mulch better). That’s it. If you’re growing a natives-only garden, your best bet is to go for a native soil mix. And if you are starting in a new suburb and your soil is builders’ rubble, the most cost-effective long-term solution that will yield healthy plants is to remove the top 20cm-50cm of sand and rubble, replace it with a landscaper’s mix, then amend it with the products mentioned above, depending on what plants you have decided to grow (natives or exotics).

I’ve put the short version up top because there are so many products I don’t want you to waste your money or time on. Even when you keep it simple, soil improvement still isn’t usually dirt cheap (ha ha). But it is made much more expensive when you think you need things like:

• pH test kits to determine whether your soil is acidic or alkaline (if you’re near the beach it is probably alkaline, if you’re further from the coast it likely ranges from acidic to neutral. Either way, you don’t need to waste your time trying to change it).

• Soil improver

• Dynamic lifter

• Rock dust

• Liquid fertilisers

• Bags of cheap compost

• Soil wetters

• Soil microbes

• Seaweed fertilisers

The reason all these products are largely ineffective is that they do not address the underlying issue, which is your soil structure. For a truly healthy and resilient garden, you want to fix the soil structure first.

If you’re a paying subscriber, below the paywall you’ll find:

• Why it’s important to fix your soil structure first (and how to do it)

• Two simple ways to test your soil before you start

• Which kind of clay amendments to buy

• Why you can stop stressing so much about slaters, slugs, snails and weird mushrooms popping up in your beds

• How to tell when you’ve achieved every gardener’s goal: rich, friable soil

You’ll also have access to all my other paywalled posts, and you’ll get a new chapter of my book delivered to you every week, so you can follow along reading it as I write it :) If you’d like to upgrade to a paid membership, you can do so here:

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The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80:20 rule) is an idea, named after the Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto, that for many outcomes or events, 20% of the inputs or causes are responsible for 80% of the results. For instance, 80% of a business’s earnings come from just 20% of its customers, 80% of your outfits are usually made up of just 20% of the total clothing you own, and on any given day, 20% of the actions you take are generally responsible for 80% of what you achieve.

Basically, there are a small handful of things we do that actually make a difference in our lives, in our businesses, to our health and so on. The same is true in the garden. There are only a few things that actually really make a big impact in your garden (don’t worry, I am going to tell you what they are). The rest is little more than busywork. And this busywork is usually the least fun and most expensive stuff.

In today’s newsletter, I want to give you a shortlist of the simple things that actually make a big difference in your garden. The things that are worth focusing on.

Whenever I meet a successful gardener who actually enjoys their garden, I notice their gardening processes tend to be strikingly similar. They put the most effort into their soil, they’ll try anything once and treat everything as an experiment, they aren’t deterred by failures, they don’t care much about weeds or pests, they pick their battles, they pay more attention to the wins than the failures, and – most of all – they enjoy themselves.

Note: Today’s newsletter is a preview from the book I am writing, which is all about growing a resilient and beautiful garden in Perth. This is Chapter 2 - how to apply the Pareto Principle to your garden to help you garden more lazily and more successfully.

To read along with the book as I write it, you can become a paying subscriber via the button below:

Subscribe now

Paying subscriber can also add comments and questions on each post, helping me tailor it to what you need :) I hope you enjoy it <3 and thank you very much for your support.

The Pareto principle applied to your garden

What makes a big difference

• Mulching and keeping your soil healthy

• Irrigation

• Edging garden beds

• Encouraging biodiversity (aka accepting pests)

• Choosing plants that want to grow in your space

• Planting trees

What doesn’t make much of a difference

• Soil wetters, liquid fertilisers, soil improvers and other miscellaneous ‘amendments’

• Spraying for pests

• Spraying for fungal diseases

• Raising seedlings in punnets

• Tiny fake cabbage butterflies stuck around the place as decoys

• Digital devices for measuring soil moisture

• Tiny plastic greenhouses (actually in Perth, most greenhouses)

• Digging and aerating the soil

Our gardens are very complex, influenced by so many factors we often cannot name and certainly cannot control. Over the years, I have encountered so many gardeners who are stressed out, making gardening much harder than it needs to be, wasting a lot of time and mental energy worrying about things they can’t really change, and sometimes actively making things worse with a lot of unnecessary fussing.

Here are a few examples:

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Perth gardeners face a constellation of challenges layered on top of one another. On their own, each challenge is hard enough, but in combination they make our gardening situation entirely unique, which explains why gardeners from other parts of the world seem to just chuck things in the ground, step back and watch them thrive. They are not gardening where we are gardening. Their backs aren’t burned, their palms aren’t sweaty, they haven’t even heard of irrigation, and they are blithely confident because they have not seen what we have seen. Forgive them, for they know not what they do, and if they lived here, their hydrangeas would absolutely be dead too.

Today’s newsletter is a preview from the book I am writing, which is all about growing a resilient and beautiful garden in Perth. This is Chapter 1 - all the things that make Perth a unique - and uniquely challenging place to garden.

If you’ve found gardening to be a relentless struggle and you’re not sure if it’s your fault, or if something else is going on, this chapter is for you - there are many things that make gardening in Perth a challenge, and identifying them helps you know how to deal with them.

To read along with the book as I write it, you can become a paying subscriber via the button below:

Subscribe now

Paying subscriber can also add comments and questions on each post, helping me shape and improve the book in real time :) I hope you enjoy it <3 and thank you very much for your support.

Perth’s weather

Let’s start with the obvious: it is really hot and dry here for large parts of the year. And climate change is not helping. In recent years there have been droughts so bad that established street trees and large swathes of bushland have died. While Perth still falls within the category of a Mediterranean climate, with mild, wet winters and hot, dry summers, it is drying, with less overall rainfall year-round, and long, unpredictable dry spells.

This makes summer gardening especially challenging, because we need to select plants that can tolerate very high temperatures, intense sunlight and periods without much water. Many beginner gardeners don’t realise that just because a plant is stocked in a Perth nursery, it doesn’t mean that plant is well suited to a Perth garden. Most nurseries stock a broad range of plants that can tolerate very different conditions. The trick is in working out which ones are suited to your garden.

As a general rule of thumb, plants that are native to Perth, and plants that have come from other Mediterranean climatic regions across the globe (for example South Africa, California, and the true Mediterranean) will tend to do better here.

Our soil

Read more

In case you missed my last newsletter (you can read it here), I’m currently writing a book about gardening in Perth. Perth is a tricky place to garden, and this is a book about what, in my opinion, actually works here. It is also a book about gardening as a pleasurable way of living rather than a list of jobs to complete.

I hope it will help make gardening feel less like work and more like a creative, relaxing and life-affirming indulgence. And I hope it will make your garden a more beautiful, resilient and enjoyable place to be.

I’m publishing my drafts as a serialised preview of the book for paying subscribers, on a weekly/fortnightly basis. If you’d like to become a paying subscriber so you can read along with the book as I write it, you can do so via the button below:

Subscribe now

Paying subscriber can also add comments and questions on each post, helping me shape and improve the book in real time, so I can make it exactly what YOU want to read (please do leave comments, I would really love to hear your thoughts and ideas!!)

I hope you enjoy it <3 and thank you very much for your support.

p.s. The book begins with chapters on gardening in summer, so as you read, bear in mind that the advice I’m giving is not for right now, but for a few months from now - consider it a heads up!

Part 1: Summer

It is February. My eight month old baby is asleep in my arms. I can hear my three year old son chirping from the front garden, where he and my husband are chopping back the fennel. Out there, the lawn has gone rogue, infiltrating the garden beds. The dry, brown fennel heads stand, brittle above a sea of untamed couch grass. One of the sprinklers is broken and the patch of lawn beside it has turned the colour of toast. A snake bean plant I got from my mother and never took out of the pot has given up on me entirely, shot its roots down into the soil, and is now climbing up the rocket (which has gone to seed) instead.

My baby sleeps on and the chilli plants struggle, and half the beds are empty. The garden is wilting, brown and wild. It is summer in Perth; the soil is turning back to sand. And our whipper snipper is broken. Help.

***

I have given up on my garden many times, and always in the summer. It took several years for me to notice this pattern. Spring would come in a rush of blooms and unbridled growth, I’d get giddy on my own gardening proficiency (I’m the best gardener, my garden is amazing, smell this sweet pea look at the butterflies!) then December would arrive, and January would follow, half the garden would burn to a crisp, and, just when I thought I could be humbled no further, there was February, in all its 40-degree glory. Every year the plants withered, the lawn died, everything flopped and sagged, and I’d remember I was a terrible gardener who didn’t know squat.

What I have learned, over the years, is not to read very much into the glorious success of spring, or the humbling, burning train wreck of summer.

If you are a gardener in Perth, that means your main job over summer is simple: don’t lose heart. Don’t decide you are an awful gardener at the height of summer. If things aren’t thriving, if they are frizzling and frying and wilting and dying, trust me: it’s not you, it’s Perth.

We’ve got our seasons all wrong

I have learned that, if you live in Perth, you need to think about the seasons quite differently.

Read more

So. I’m writing a book about gardening in Perth. If you live here, you’ll know that it is a hot and sandy city with nowhere near enough trees and - often - not enough gardening advice that takes into account the specific (and sometimes extreme) challenges of keeping plants alive.

It’s a book about what actually works here, and also about gardening as a pleasurable way of living rather than a list of jobs to complete.

I hope it will help make gardening feel less like work and more like a creative, relaxing and life-affirming indulgence. And I hope it will make your garden a more beautiful, resilient and enjoyable place to be.

I’m publishing the first drafts as I write them, chapter by chapter, for paying subscribers. I have been talking about doing this for likeeeee a year and a half (maybe more??). BUT I now actually have an editor, a deadline, and a quarter of the book drafted, so THIS IS HAPPENING. I will not be going quiet again for some time now. Thank you for your patience while I sorted my shit out!

This is a free intro to the series, so you can get a feel for what’s to come. If you’re a paying subscriber, you’ll get a newsletter from the book fortnightly from now until at least next spring, so lots and lots of garden content to come!

If you’d like to become a paying subscriber so you can read along with the book as I write it, you can do so via the button below:

Subscribe now

Paying subscriber can also add comments and questions on each post, helping me shape and improve the book in real time, so I can make it exactly what YOU want to read (please do leave comments, I would really, truly love to hear your thoughts and ideas!!)

I hope you enjoy it <3 and thank you very much for your support.

How to Grow a Garden in Hell

So, you want to grow a garden.

All things considered that is an entirely justifiable desire. The only problem is you live in a sandpit, perched on the edge of a raging sea, on land that is many millions of years old and hasn’t seen a whiff of fertiliser (save the odd kangaroo dropping) in a few millennia.

Your ‘garden’ is largely composed of crisp, brown couch grass, or perhaps it is paved entirely; a sea of brick that leads gravely up to the corrugated metal fencing that runs the perimeter of your yard and is too slippery and hot for any plant to attach themselves to.

Meanwhile, the internet, the TV and the radio are awash with people talking about overflowing harvest baskets, the best time to prune your roses, and why you should be concerned about caterpillars on your broad beans, but this feels like foreign chatter from some lush and verdant world you don’t recognise, and each time January rolls around, you (and whatever half-dead plants you’re trying to grow) are baked to oblivion by the offensive rays of a sun that really, truly doesn’t give a shit about your hydrangeas.

Welcome to Perth. Let’s grow some stuff.

If any of the above rings true for you, I imagine that the idea of growing a beautiful, thriving garden in Perth, Western Australia feels like a pipe dream. I want you to know three things. The first is that yes, Perth is a legitimately hard place to grow a garden, especially because the majority of garden advice you’ll find is not written with our extreme conditions in mind. The second thing I want you to know is that, despite the challenges we face, it is extremely, deliciously, delightfully possible to have a beautiful garden here (and I’ll teach you how). The last thing I want you to know, though, is that having a beautiful garden is missing the point.

With enough money, anyone can have a beautiful garden – you can just ask someone else to make it and maintain it for you. Where I live, many people have beautiful gardens, and they are never out in them. What I want to teach you - what I’m convinced is the only thing that actually matters – is how to become a gardener. Because being a gardener – pushing seeds into the bare soil and watching, days later, as tiny cautious seedlings poke their noses through the earth, getting dirt under your nails, twigs in your hair and sunburnt shoulders, greeting the birds every morning as they visit your garden – these are the things that make life wonderful.

There is a reason why gardeners tend to be happier, healthier and less anxious people, and it’s because spending time outdoors, growing things, fills a fundamental human need that has, very recently, been largely forgotten about. We have moved inside, switched on the air-conditioning, felled our trees, bricked our yards and lost one of life’s simplest, purest pleasures.

I am going to teach you what you need to know to grow a successful garden in Perth, whether you’re starting with an empty block, a balcony, a wild and untamed garden or an empty backyard full of weeds and couch grass. And I want to do this by teaching you the simple, practical, overarching rules you can apply throughout your life, so that you can grow a garden wherever you go. But I also want to teach you a different approach to gardening; one that prioritises enjoyment above all else, and one that is focused on making the experience of gardening the goal, not the garden.

Perth needs more gardens – our planet needs more gardens - but what we need, more even than that, is gardeners.

Seven rules for gardening

Before we get into the nitty gritty of dirt and bugs and roots and blooms and secret green tunnels and blueberries that flail inexplicably and drop all their flowers, I want to give you seven rules that I hope will guide what you do in your garden. These will feature throughout the book, and they are there to help you to, in a nutshell, become a happier and lazier gardener. You can, of course, ignore them entirely whenever you want (I hate rules), but in my own garden, I have found them to always be helpful, and to usually be right.

1. Soil is everything

Healthy soil = healthy plants. Which is a bit unfortunate, because Perth soil sucks! Don’t worry - we will be fixing that in Chapter 3.

2. Right plant, right spot

So much of gardening boils down to just growing plants that like the spot they’re in. Don’t let yourself get seduced by aspirational plants that don’t really want to grow here (Hydrangeas! Azaleas! Cherries! Peonies!). Plant for the garden you have, not the garden you wish you had.

If you need help, look at what is growing in your neighbourhood to help you find plants that are predisposed to like it here. It is so much more fun growing plants that want to be in your garden.

3. Let your garden show you what works

Watch what is going on out there. Pay attention to your plants, see what is working and what isn’t, then just do more of what works.

Don’t assume that the internet or some garden guru has the absolute answers to anything. Instead, be a scientist – observe your own garden, tinker, experiment with doing things at different times, test the same plant in different spots, basically get to know your garden.

Treat gardening with curiosity, and your garden will show you the easiest way to grow things successfully. This method is vastly more foolproof than expecting a stranger on the internet in another part of the world to be able to tell you definitively what your plants need.

4. Do less

…And if you’re unsure of what to do, start by doing nothing.

Often we make things worse by jumping in and trying to fix them - we fuss over plants and accidentally kill them, we stress out about bugs and prevent natural equilibriums from establishing. We scratch scabs, chew our nails, waste our energy on the wrong stuff. Leave more things alone - you’ll be surprised at how often the garden can sort itself out.

While we’re on the subject, let yourself move slowly. The most valuable gardening often looks like doing nothing, because this is when you are observing and getting to know your garden – don’t discount the time you spend out there letting your mind wander.

5. Expect chaos in a complex system

Gardens are so complex, influenced by so many things, the majority of which we do not notice of cannot measure. Some years something will thrive, other years it’ll fail, and you’ll have no idea why.

Don’t expect to be able to unpick or control every bit of input in a complex system.

Accept that you are often just bearing witness to things that are beyond your influence, and learn to rejoice in the successes when they come.

6. You WILL kill your plants (get over it!)

Don’t chase perfection – it doesn’t exist, and trying to do things ‘right’ often means you freeze up and do nothing. All gardeners kill plants, it comes with the territory. Don’t worry about it!

7. Gardens are never finished

Your garden will never be finished - nothing is guaranteed or set in stone. Accepting that change is inevitable is what actually makes gardening become fun. Nothing stays the same! Everything can be undone, reshaped, reimagined, and so there really aren’t any true mistakes. It is your playground, it is a canvas that will never be finished, and it can be anything you like.

Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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I seem to be forgetting, constantly, that I’m knocking on the door of 40. (SHUT UP NO I’M NOT YES I AM NO I’M NOT). My parents are now the grandparents and my Nanna‘s garden, in all its hills hoisted, bore-water-stained, sweet-pea-blooming glory is very much a relic of the past. Nevertheless! That’s exactly what I want to talk to you about today because, much like all beautiful things of bygone eras, Nanna gardens are becoming increasingly rare, and I think they still have some valuable gardening lessons to teach us, if we pay attention.

The thing is, if you see a Nanna Garden today, you’re almost certainly not going to look twice, and chances are it’s not going to inspire you. This isn’t the fault of the garden, or of the Nanna who created it. If it’s a true Nanna garden - according to my Millennial definition - she is either no longer on this mortal coil, or she’s nearing 100 and is probably too busy running from her Mahjong class to water ballet to keep her pelargoniums adequately watered.

Most Nanna gardens you see nowadays are either in a state of neglect because their originators aren’t around to care for them, or they’ve been dug up and replaced with something more ‘fashionable’. And there’s the shame. Because Nanna gardens are cool, man, and you know what else? They are TOUGH. The ones that persist despite their neglect might look shabby, but have you noticed that most of the plants are still alive? The thing that makes Nanna gardens interesting (and worthy of your time and attention) is that they are filled with plants that have stood the test of time. They may have gone out of fashion, but they persist, in gardens that may not have seen a lot of care for the better part of a half century.

Now imagine what they’d look like in your garden! With a little more water, a little better soil. Bloody beautiful is how they’d look!!! If you are looking for tough and reliable plants that will last a half century in PERTH, I have one piece of advice: look to the Nanna garden!

There’s one other reason I want the Nanna garden to make a comeback. The 1950s through into the 1970s were decades characterised by sunshine and excess. Everything was bold, and bright, swirly, detailed and colourful. I know I’m mashing together three whole decades for the sake of argument, but from Elvis to the Beatles, it just feels like there was a more potent, bold joie de vivre to be found back then. And maybe everyone’s just too busy on TikTok to take hallucinogens nowadays, and maybe I’m romanticising the past…but I reaaaaaally feel like we need a bit more colour in our lives. Everything now seems so serious, so concreted, so technologically driven and monochromatically, modernly stark.

Gardens of the 50s, 60s and 70’s had shady corners that turned into jungles, sunny courtyards filled with frilly petunias and lurid red roses! Bright white cast iron outdoor sets that looked like lace doilies turned solid! Floral cushions! Cucumber and egg sandwiches! Love swings! Sun loungers!

Is it any wonder that the generations who brought us Pina Coladas, Mai Tais and Harvey WALLBANGERS were maybe, perhaps, just a little bit more fun and revelrous than we are today? Well, I want what they’re having.

If you are looking for tough and reliable plants that will last a half century in Perth, I have one piece of advice: look to the Nanna garden! And if you're a paying subscriber, below you'll find a list of twenty-five of my favourite Nanna plants to grow in Perth.

My favourite Nanna Plants for a Perth garden

Small flowering plants

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I guess historically it’s been a bit of a mixed bag.

The good news, though, is it’s 2026 and we really can have it all. We can have our climbing roses, we can eat our cake and wear trousers but not bras and if someone tries to grope our bums in a dimly lit bar we can GROPE THEM RIGHT BACK and say ‘how’d you like THAT bucko’. Which is, of course, something I just made up and have never done.

And what’s more, we can live in a sweltering, dry, harsh Australian climate and STILL revel in the joys of growing a cottage garden! Don’t believe me? Here’s mine:

A brief history of the cottage garden

Cottage gardening didn’t actually begin as an intentional style. Originally, cottage gardens were just practical spaces for growing fruits, vegetables and herbs. In fact, some cottage gardens allegedly grew nothing but potatoes. These early cottage gardens were planted by working class people, often middle-ranking servants of English royal or noble households. They were spaces primarily used to raise animals for meat, bees for honey and herbs for medicine.

There is some debate about when The Cottage Garden became a specific style of gardening, although it seems that at some point the wealthier ‘leisured’ class noticed what had been planted under their noses in the back alleys of their estates and decided to make it a ‘style’. Maybe they wanted to prove that they were *men of the people*, down-to-earth chillers, unpretentious and cool, and obviously a bed full of potatoes is the best way to do that. If nothing else, it was probably cheaper than giving their servants a raise.

So, instead of hoighty toighty formal gardens with perfectly trimmed lawns and snobbish hedgerows, these affluent aristocrats with hearts of gold decided they wanted gardens with overflowing borders, rambling climbers and a general intermixing of edibles with ornamentals.

The idea of an informal planting style seems to go in and out of fashion. As does the idea of gardening for food and practicality. The 1990s gardens I remember from my childhood were certainly not cottage gardens. They were primarily filled with spiky, drought-tolerant agaves, bloody mondo grass everywhere, some parched palms and uniformly sad-looking Moses-in-the-cradle plants in every border.

So I guess it’s not altogether surprising that a lot of people I speak to assume that cottage gardens just ‘can’t be done’ in Australia. They think that our climate dictates planting spiky monocultures of drought-resistant plants in styles that are antithetical to the cascading flowers and soft borders of the English cottage garden.

Fortunately that’s not remotely true!

The Australian Cottage Garden - it’s a thing!

There are two things to know about growing cottage gardens in Australia.

First, plenty of plants that work in English cottage gardens will work just fine here as long as we provide them with good soil and enough water during summer. Check out my list of traditional cottage garden plants that work in Australia (below) to see what plants grow well in our climate.

Second, you don’t actually have to grow traditional English plants to have a rambling, sprawling and very beautiful cottage style garden. And there are many gorgeous native Australian, South African and Mediterranean plants that are well-suited to our climate and will give your garden a beautiful cottage garden style. Take a look at my list of non-traditional cottage garden plants (also below) for some ideas of what will work well.

To be honest, I don’t even think you have to limit yourselves to plants that look ‘cottagey’. Apparently my garden looks like a cottage garden, but it’s filled with a pretty eclectic assortment of plants, from banana and mango trees to aloes and sweet peas. Maybe our first mistake is thinking we need to be beholden to any kind of planting style in the first place. My rule is: if something lives happily in my garden it is very welcome to stay, no matter where it comes from or what ‘style’ it supposedly fits. As long as it’s not Moses-in-the-cradle. Or Mondo grass.

Note: The rest of this newsletter is available to paying subscribers. Below the paywall you’ll find:

• Traditional cottage plants that do well in Perth: edibles, herbs, and ornamentals

• Non-traditional plants that thrive here and also look cottage-y

• Landscaping tips for a cottage style

• How to make a garden look beautifully wild rather than messy, including:

  • How to use repetition and contrast in your planting

  • Adding edging, bird baths, pots and arches for structure and height

  • Plus specific plant combinations for the front, middle and back of a border

If you’d like to read the full article, you can subscribe below :)

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Traditional plants that work

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I’m sure that there are many more traditional cottage garden plants that will also work in an Australian climate. These are the ones I can vouch for because they’ve worked for me.

Edibles

• Potatoes (I plant mine in a big pot so I don’t lose them in the garden beds)

• Dwarf fruit trees (apples, pears)

• Root vegetables (carrots, radishes, turnips, beetroot)

• Cape gooseberries (these aren’t the typical gooseberry you’d see in a traditional English cottage garden. Cape gooseberries, also known as Peruvian ground cherries, are - as the name suggests - native to Peru and Chile, not England… but they’re delicious and I love them).

• Umbels (fennel, parsley, caraway, coriander, dill, chervil)

• Salad greens (lettuce, silverbeet, spinach, sorrel)

• Brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, rocket, mustard greens, kale)

These are my favourites, but the truth is, I haven’t come across that many vegetables that don’t work in Perth’s climate provided they get adequate water in summer.

Herbs

Herbs are a classic part of the English cottage garden (and, if you let them flower, are fantastic for attracting pollinators and beneficial insects). I’ve already mentioned a few of my favourite herbs in the umbel family (for more on the Umbel family of plants read this post) but you can also grow:

• Rosemary

• Thyme

• Oregano

• Tarragon

• Sage

• Marjoram

• Chamomile

• Lavender

• Plus a few traditional ‘herbs’ that aren’t edible, including tansy and wormwood

Ornamentals

This list reaaaally has the potential to sprawl endlessly, so I’ll just name my favourites...

Cottage ornamentals

• Stocks

• Sweet peas

• Violas

• Primroses

• Carnations

• Tulips

• Crocuses

• Daffodils

• Foxgloves

• Delphiniums

• Daisies

• Evening primroses

• Wisteria

• Verbena bonariensis

• Aquilegias

• Poppies

• Clematis (works fine in Australia provided you give it a shady position for its roots and a climbing frame for it to grow towards sunlight)

Cottage ornamentals with edible flowers

• Calendula

• Borage

• Heartsease (an edible variety of viola - note: not all violas are edible)

• Hollyhocks

• Pansies

• Sweet alyssum

• Roses

• Elderflowers

• Marigolds

Non-traditional plants that work

While these aren’t considered traditional English cottage garden plants, you’d never know it to look at them:

• Sage and all ornamental salvias (which are actually native to Mexico)

• Geraniums, pelargoniums and society garlic (all of which originated in South Africa)

• Rosemary, Dusty Miller (Jacobaea maritima) and bay trees (which all hail from the Mediterranean)

• Oyster plants

• Cistus (which is native to the Mediterranean, Morocco, Portugal and regions of the Middle East - this is a great cascading bush that is covered in delicate flowers in springtime and loves our dry climate)

• Nemesia (also from South Africa)

• Angels Trumpet

• Cosmos and marigolds (native to Mexico and Guatemala)

• Californian poppies

• Nasturtiums

• Verbena bonariensis (native to South America)

• Saltbush (a gorgeous native Australian plant with silvery-grey edible leaves)

• Bidens (thought to originate in South America)

• Jasmine (which originated in the Himalayas)

• Blue Rottnest Island Daisy (a gorgeous local native)

To be fair, if you go back far enough many of the ‘traditional’ English cottage garden plants don’t have English origins either. After all, apples originated in Kazakhstan and pears came from China! We live in a glorious melting pot of shared plants, intermingling cultures, traded crafts and accumulated hybridised knowledge. Which is something that makes our species infinitely creative, relentlessly interesting and, in my humble opinion, reflects a beautiful part of our common humanity.

And the truth is, cottage gardening is a lot less about the exact plants you’re growing and a lot more about how you design and style your garden. To that end, here are some quick final recommendations for using layout and design to create a cottage garden aesthetic. It’s not only about the plants, after all - it also matters where you put them!

Styling tricks

There are a few basic features of a cottage garden layout that, once incorporated into your garden, will really help achieve a cottage-y style. I have used the word ‘rambling’ several times already but I will use it one last time - you want to have a garden with a rambling feeling. This means:

Winding paths

Paths that disappear into the garden create a sense of mystery, of wilderness and a kind of unbridled beauty. Aim to build several into your garden, and plant around them so that their final destination is obscured from view - this adds to the magical, mysterious feeling and draws you into the garden (to see where the path leads)

Overflowing borders

Borders that overflow with (slightly) unkempt flowers give cottage gardens a relaxed and informal sort of ‘looseness’ - plant things like bidens, sweet alyssum and salvias right up close to the edges of your garden beds. As they flower and bloom the flowers will spill out onto your paths, helping to soften the paths and giving the garden a tumbling, gentle feeling.

A little chaos

Semi-chaotic beauty is a tricky balance to strike, but incredible when done well. You want a garden that looks wild and unmanaged, but in truth these gardens are always (secretly) managed. Without a bit of thought and care it’s easy to accidentally plant a cottage garden that really just looks messy and busy. Avoiding the messy look is something that comes with practice and experimentation, and - for me - is still an ongoing project (I usually find myself diving back into our garden at the end of each summer to rearrange and re-order things).

That said, there are a few things you can do to make your garden look beautifully wild as opposed to ‘vacant block’ wild…

Tips for balancing wilderness and beauty

Use repeat plantings

Repeat the same plants throughout the garden to help tie different areas together and give the garden a feeling of consistency - Breadseed poppies do this every spring in my garden, popping up in the unfilled spots and adding a pink mist to every bed. Self sown fennel has the same effect, as do soft grasses or plants with silvery foliage like wormwood.

Plant in clumps

Plant clumps of plants rather than individual plants - individual plants can look ‘bitty’ and messy but, if you plant a clump of the same plant, suddenly it makes a bigger impact and is much prettier to look at.

Add solid structures to the garden

Use edging around your garden beds, add bird baths, pots and arches - these inorganic materials help to add a more solid structure to parts of your garden which plays nicely against the softer flowing plants, creating focal points and a sense of order. They can also help to add height.

Repeat colours

Repeat colours (of blooms or foliage) throughout the garden - like repeating the same plant through the garden, repeating colours helps to tie the whole thing together.

Start with just a few key plants

If the garden feels chaotic, try to plant fewer different species of plants while you learn your way around the planting style. Having one of every species of plant is fun (I should know, I am ALWAYS buying random new plants) but it can be hard to fit them in without creating a chaotic feel. If in doubt, repeat what works and add new singular stuff in gradually.

Use contrasting plants

As well as growing plants in clumps to make them more impactful, it can help to plant quite different plants next to each other. Ideally, each clump will pop out against the foliage of its neighbour. This helps give distinction to your garden - rather than one seething mess of green, you’ll see discrete pockets of colours and shapes. Here are a few ways you can create this contrast:

• Grow plants with small, feathery leaves next to plants with large round leaves (e.g. at the front of a border try a clump of yarrow next to a clump of lambs ears)

• Grow plants with silvery foliage next to plants with burgundy foliage (e.g. at the middle of a border plant wormwood next to purple kale or giant red Japanese mustard greens)

• Grow floaty grasses next to stiff, structural plants (e.g. try tall and spiky blue sea holly next to a soft Miscanthus or a WA native grass like coastal tussock-grass, Poa poiformis)

• Grow plants that flower with tall spikes next to plants that have flat, horizontal blooms (e.g. grow tall, yellow verbascum next to flowering fennel, carrots or coriander)

And that about wraps it up for today!

I hope I’ve given you a bit of courage and motivation to grow your own cottage garden. I may be biased but I think cottage gardens are some of the most beautiful gardens in the world. Grow a cottage garden and you’ll never run out of things to uncover and discover.

They’re fabulous for attracting wildlife, they can feed you, provide you with fragrant flowers and herbs and, more than that, I think they appeal to something deep and childlike in us. The fairy gardens that we always wanted to immerse ourselves in as children. Filled with secret corners, hiding spots and a world of insects. And, again, very few instances of mondo grass.

Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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If you read my last newsletter, you’ll know that I have long avoided growing WA natives out of a mixture of trepidation, laziness and somewhat big-headed indignation about the puritanical way a lot of people seem to approach growing natives. I didn’t want an all-native garden, but for some reason I thought that was my only option.

Then I discovered Donna Rumenos and her husband Matt; two gardeners in the southwest who are doing exactly what I should’ve done in the first place: they are growing native West Australian plants, as well as whatever the hell else they like.

This is what gardening is supposed to be! We are not trying to recreate the wild bush, we are not carrying the full weight of regenerative agriculture on our shoulders. We are making something wholly unnatural in our backyards. Something that hopefully fills our days with joy, cools our homes, provides food for the bugs and birds that live nearby. Something, in short, that does no harm and makes us happy.

So, because most of what I do on here is driven purely by my own self-interest, I thought I would ask Donna and Matt if I could pick their brains for all their native-and-exotic gardening tips, in the hope that I could apply their advice to my own garden. They very kindly and generously obliged. What follows is my interview with them, sprinkled with images from their delightfully glorious garden.

If you are a paying subscriber, you’ll also find a collection of plant lists, favourite nurseries, and online shops, and gardening tips courtesy of Donna and Matt at the bottom of this newsletter.

If you’re not already a paying subscriber, but you want all the intel, you can subscribe by clicking the button below. And thank you so much to all of you who already support me and my work - it means so very much!

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Donna & Matt: The Interview

Casey: Could you please introduce yourself and Matt, your backgrounds (you mentioned on Instagram that you have backgrounds in conservation and forestry?), and how you both discovered your love of gardening?

Donna: We have both grown up with a love of plants, gardens and the unique flora of Western Australia. Matt studied horticulture and I studied botany and zoology. We met while working in separate forestry nurseries. Matt now is a flora conservation officer protecting our local threatened flora and I work with environmental issues in forestry.

Casey: When did you start work on your current garden, and what was it like to begin with?

Donna: We unexpectedly had the opportunity to buy this property shortly after the birth of our first child 11 years ago. It is a small farm south of Manjimup and the house was surrounded by a garden of conifers. Although it was hardy and established, we wanted much more variety in our garden so with great effort Matt pulled out the conifers and we tried to replenish the soil with manures and compost.

As we are on top of a hill (poor soil, exposed to wind) and on tank water only, we had to source very hardy plants to cope with the conditions. Although we are in a high rainfall region, summer is normally six or more months without substantial rain.

We researched Mediterranean climate plants, with books from Olivier Filippi and Heidi Gildemeister being great inspirations. And of course, we wanted to incorporate the local native plants we loved wherever possible.

How do you choose what plants to grow?

Casey: One thing I love about your garden is it manages to be utterly beautiful and also completely pragmatic. And also not ideologically driven - there is this purist idea I’ve come across repeatedly that gardens should be all native or they’re not ‘correct’. That natives are the ONLY plants we should grow. That we can’t mix and match. But you have aeoniums planted amongst Grevilleas planted beside irises and lavender. I love it! It is eclectic and it seems (to me) to be guided by two main questions; will it survive and is it beautiful. So, how do you choose what plants to grow in your garden?

Donna: Yes, you have distilled it down brilliantly to those two questions! Survival is number one as we don’t have the water or the time to cosset plants that need extra. And of course we want our plants to be beautiful, and to spark joy on that daily garden reconnaissance.

We don’t combine plants randomly, we do try to select those that will cope with our conditions. These don’t necessarily need to be native.

South-western Australia is one of the few Mediterranean climates in the world. Cool, wet winters with very hot, dry summers, along with WA’s nutrient poor soils are a challenge for European style gardening.

Plants from the other Mediterranean biomes including the true Mediterranean, South Africa, California and Chile are placed to do well in these conditions. They have many similar adaptations, for example small or silvery leaves, and with their main growth and flowering cycles through autumn, winter and early spring, often going partially dormant to survive summer. Mediterranean climate zones also have some of the world’s greatest plant diversity so there is plenty to choose from (though not always available locally).

We do research our plant choices to check from where the species originates and its preferred habitat.

Note that plants labelled ‘drought tolerant’ do not always cut it here – they are often labelled this from a European or even an eastern Australian context - where a normal Western Australian summer can prove too much. Anything that says regular watering or soil moisture on the label is not going to make it at our place. And we have trialled and killed many, many plants.

For the plants that do work in our garden, we propagate through cuttings, seed or division so we can repeat them throughout.

Selecting plants with similar water & soil requirements

Casey: I’ve always been told that the water and soil requirements for natives vs exotics were just too different to be able to combine them successfully. Can you talk about this a little? Is it totally false, or perhaps true for some plants but not others? How do you manage to combine Australian natives with exotics in the same bed while meeting each plant’s needs?

Donna: We choose plants to cope with the conditions, and when they can do that, we are not too concerned about where they come from. An example that most people are familiar with would be the South African proteas and leucadendrons. They fit so effortlessly into the Australian climate and flora that many people mistakenly believe they are Australian natives and they are often found in the ‘native’ section in nurseries.

Our garden is too big, and we don’t have enough water to cosset plants. For plants in their first year, we will try and hand water through their first summer but after that they are on their own. So, they all need to be able to cope with this regime.

That being said, many native plants will do much better and be prettier in a garden setting with some of the right fertiliser, water and judicious pruning. One must be careful with Proteaceae (banksias, hakeas) where regular fertilisers containing phosphorus can kill them.

The aesthetics of mixing natives and exotics

Casey: Are there any tactics or methods you use when combining different plants to work out what will pair well together aesthetically? Leaf shape, colour, upright or sprawling etc? Any design tips that help you create such a beautiful landscape?

Donna: It’s visually interesting to combine different forms, colour and structure. We want the garden to be interesting all year, not just when it’s flowering, so the foliage and form is vital.

We include silver leaved and grassy/strappy plants in most garden beds, and bronze or red foliage can be a great addition. Structural plants (e.g. succulents, small trees, palms, grass trees) are important focal points to ensure the garden doesn’t all run together in an amorphous blob. Keeping some shrubs neatly clipped and allowing others to have flowers or stalks that blow in the wind usually pairs well. And repetition - repeat some of the same plants throughout for cohesion.

For flower colours, I personally prefer to keep to pastel tones as these are harmonious and don’t clash like brighter colours can. Stronger colours however combine well with other strong colours. We should choose what makes us happy!

Pruning natives (without killing them!)

Casey: I’ve seen on your Instagram some of your natives are happy with heavy pruning, but I’ve killed a bunch of natives by trying to prune them! Are there any rules of thumb for selecting natives that accept a heavy prune, or any tips for pruning successfully? I’ve been looking into the Woody Meadow Project to get ideas for which ones might tolerate it; but would love your advice!

Donna: Plants capable of coppicing should be able to be pruned without problem, if they are established. The woody meadow project is doing a great job of exploring this.

We’d suggest its best to keep plants pruned from a young age so they will be full and compact. Most natives will look better and be healthier and even longer lived with some pruning. If you feel bad about pruning, note that you are replicating natural grazing pressures that are absent in our gardens…!

For paying subscribers…

Below you’ll find:

• A list of Donna and Matt’s favourite places to get their plants across WA and online

• Suggestions for which local natives to plant in a shady garden

• Donna and Matt’s top 9 exotic plants for a Perth garden

• Donna and Matt’s top 9 native West Australian plants for a Perth garden

• Specific pairing suggestions for combining natives and non-natives (which strange bedfellows look especially beautiful when planted together)

• Advice for any gardeners who - like me - are just beginning to add natives to their gardens

I hope you find it as interesting and inspiring as I did. Ok, here we go!

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Let’s talk about growing native plants!

In my garden, until today, there were two native Australian plants - a champagne pink Callistemon (bottlebrush) growing in a partly shaded corner. It has grown leggy and tall - almost taller than the roof, reaching for the light. When it blooms, birds flock to it. It’s lovely. Opposite it is a sandpaper wattle that I bought years ago and decorated as a living Christmas tree, then finally planted once all its leaves started falling off on our living room floor. In late winter it has fat yellow caterpillar blooms that drape themselves languidly from its branches. Another lovely plant.

But, as far as I’m aware, it’s just those two. I’ve had others in the past, but have usually managed to kill them. And now I think about it there are a couple of kangaroo paws sulking off in one corner. The sandpaper wattle is native to WA, I’m not too sure about the bottlebrush. And actually I tell a lie, sort of, because my husband has filled our verge with an untold number of native plants, including the spikiest tree thing I have ever seen, that froths with white blooms in summer (they smell like honey). But I can’t claim credit for those.

Why am I not growing more West Australian native plants?

Well, because I am a morally reprehensible, irresponsible arsehole, of course! I clearly don’t give a damn about our native wildlife, I am ignorant to the bountiful natural beauty that exists in our massive state, and I must - surely - carry around with me a colonial mindset that undervalues and damages the land on which I live.

Orrrrr MAYBE it’s none of those things!! Maybe the reasons are much, much simpler and a whole lot less interesting.

Let me backtrack slightly. To a year or two ago, when I started getting the same, all-too-familiar comments on my Instagram posts, asking me why I was promoting exotic plants in a West Australian garden, warning me that the plants I was growing were invasive pests, sure to break out of my backyard and spread through our untouched bushland, and telling me over and over to just plant natives.

I don’t like doing what I’m told. And I didn’t like the implication that, by sharing my love of gardening and my enthusiasm about plants with other people online, I was somehow actively damaging our environment. I also suspected that half of these people would call anything ‘native’ (and therefore virtuous) if it came from any region of Australia, even if it originated on the other side of the continent. The illogicality of that rankled with me. Whether they wanted to or not, the native plant puritans had driven me further away from growing any of the plants they recommended.

And there’s the real shame. Because I actually think growing native plants is fantastic. Especially for creating a garden that is truly, vibrantly alive with our local wildlife. For several years now, I have wanted to add more native plants to our garden, I just couldn’t work out how, and because the subject felt so laced with puritanism and emotion, I shied away. The problem is, there were real, fairly boring, practical reasons why I didn’t feel excited to add more native plants to the garden. But because it’s such a taboo subject, I didn’t feel like I could talk about it, so I didn’t find any solutions.

Well today I thought I’d stick my head above the parapet, because in the last couple of weeks I have discovered a way of growing native plants that actually excites me, and I have stumbled upon some gardeners who have completely inspired me with pragmatic, no-nonsense methods that aren’t hamstrung by ideology and are, most important, breathtakingly beautiful. More on those in a mo.

First up, here is a list of the reasons I have been put off growing natives. I share it because if these things put me off, I figure they may have put you off too, and if what we all want, ultimately, is for there to be more gardens filled with native flora and fauna, these are the things we need to address. So, here are the totally banal and (I think) actually quite reasonable reasons that I have, until now, not been growing local natives.

All my grumbles and whines about Australian natives

• When I have tried to grow native plants in the past, 9 times out of 10 they have died suddenly and unexpectedly (native plants seem to either be absolutely bomb proof or actually quite fussy)

• After a year or two I find they get too big and woody, taking up too much space and looking messy

• I believed that natives couldn’t be combined with non-natives because the enriched soil and irrigation in my non-native beds would kill them, so I thought there was a forced choice I’d have to make between all-natives or all-exotics

• I don’t want to grow only natives, and I don’t want a bush block (much as I appreciate their beauty in other peoples gardens). I want a whacky, otherworldly, slightly Jurassic, Willy wonka, flower-filled bizarro backyard, with an eclectic mix of plants that pull at my heart strings

• Native plants are often sold as tube stock, and not in flower, making it hard to know where to place them

• Many natives don’t have colloquial names, and in all honesty, I find it harder to learn and remember the long latin names for plants I’m only just encountering.

• I want to grow as many easy edible plants as possible, and I have yet to find any bush tucker plants whose flavours blow me away

• I love deciduous trees and don’t want a garden that is in shade all year round

• Many native plants don’t like transplantation or pruning, so I don’t know how to handle them. I also want a garden that needs maintenance because I love gardening. I don’t actually like the idea of planting a bunch of tough tube stock that needs nothing from me and that I can’t tend to and fiddle with.

I’ve gardened all my life, and all my life, these factors have put me off native plants.

Then, a week or two ago, an old uni friend sent me the Instagram account of Annmaree Winter, and everything in my brain EXPLODED.

You actually can have your cake and eat it!!

What’s really stupid is that I preach on here all the time about it being ok when plants die. I tell anyone who’ll listen that you can grow a garden however you like. I say there are no hard and fast rules for anything, and that you should experiment in any way you please. And for some reason, until I found Annmaree’s Instagram account I applied none of that to growing native West Australian plants in my own garden.

Annmaree lives over east, and her garden is EXACTLY what I had wanted to create but didn’t know how - a beautiful, other-worldly mix of natives, Mediterranean plants and cottage garden perennials. Looking at it kind of left me dumbstruck. She’s got banksias next to succulents next to perennial grasses underplanted with rosemary and daisies and so much more. It is bold and rugged and delicate and it looks like absolutely no place on earth and I LOVE IT.

There should be so many more gardens like this, and I wonder if, perhaps, there aren’t simply because of all the unnecessary dogma that surrounds ‘growing natives’. Fortunately there is at least one other garden like this, and - even more fortunately - it is in WA, and belongs to Donna and Matt Rumenos (you can check out Donna’s Instagram here).

Annmaree put me onto Donna; a botanist and zoologist who works in foresty and lives in the Southwest with her husband Matt; a horticulturist and flora conservation officer. Donna’s garden also blew me away, so I immediately messaged her in a flurry of ill-contained excitement, and will be sharing an interview I did with her in next week’s newsletter (which I hope makes up for my recent quietness on here - it is pretty much impossible to get long-form newsletters out right now with a baby who only naps 45 minutes a day!!).

Anyway, Donna and Matt’s interview is coming up, but for today I want to pass on some gold nuggets I gleaned from my conversation with Annmaree, because I think they’re useful to discuss before we get onto Donna and Matt’s specific plant recommendations and gardening advice.

Woody Meadow Gardening

To recap, the main reasons I have shied away from native plants boil down to:

1. I assumed I couldn’t combine them with non-natives because they’d require vastly different growing conditions, and

2. I thought I’d kill them if I ever tried to prune them.

I figured the only option this left me with was a sort of natives-only bush block aesthetic, and I didn’t want that. Happily, I was wrong on all counts! Yes, these limitations are true for some native plants, but absolutely not all of them, as Annmaree and Donna and Matt’s gardens illustrate - the trick is in selecting natives that can handle a little bit of soil improvement, and combining them with exceptionally tough plants that come from other Mediterranean climates (for instance South Africa, California, and the true Mediterranean), and so can handle the heat and tolerate fairly dry soils.

What about pruning?

So, the right natives actually can be mixed with exotics. What about my second main issue - the woody, scrubby sprawl that so many local natives seem to develop after a few years of growth?

In response to this, Annmaree recommended I check out the Woody Meadow Project; a project run by the University of Melbourne looking to find native plants that can be cut back, almost to ground level, every 18 months. This ‘coppicing’ sort of mimics the effects of a bushfire sweeping through the area, and is an entirely different way of growing natives.

A hard prune every year or two means that you aren’t left to deal with old growth, and huge woody shrubs with leafless centres. There is none of that big, scrubby wilderness that - to me - always feels kind of ‘ungardened’. Instead, there is lush, leafy new growth - plants that can be contained, clipped, and made really beautiful. Yes, hard pruning will absolutely kill a tonne of native plants but (as with exotics), there are some species that respond really well to it. If you head to the Woody Meadow Project website, you’ll find a list of all the plants they have tested so far, and you can use this to find inspiration for your own garden.

As I scanned the list of Woody Meadow plants, I felt my hesitation and trepidation lift. For some reason, while I’ll happily kill every other plant under the sun, it felt like a categorical error to kill a native plant. Annmaree’s garden, Donna and Matt’s garden, and the Woody Meadow project gave me the permission I needed to start to actually experiment with adding natives to our garden. I now have two dwarf banksias in the backyard, beside salvias and cypress pines, and another in the front under a wisteria. I am propagating some saltbush and have found some rust-brown Correas that I plan to pop in the back of the garden.

I also bought a bunch of other natives as tube stock, which are currently waiting to be planted but I can’t tell you what they are because I instantly forgot the moment I bought them. Some things don’t change.

Anyway, I am not going to give you specific native plant gardening tips today, because I am entirely new to this and - currently - know basically nothing. You’ll get some excellent plant suggestions from Donna and Matt next week.

For now, what I am going to give you, in case you need it, is permission to throw out any gardening rule book that says you have to garden a particular way. This has been a great reminder for me that overly prescriptive gardening advice is insidious enough to even scare off gardeners as slapdash and bullish as yours truly! I didn't think it could be done, but there you go!

So, enough of rules! Enough of puritanism and moralising in the garden! What most inspired me about Annmaree’s and Donna and Matt’s gardens is that, in hot, harsh and unpredictable Australian climates, their gardens are guided, almost exclusively, by just two questions: will it survive, and will it look beautiful? In the end, no matter what kind of garden you aspire to grow, I think those are, really, the only questions worth asking.

So, off I go to learn about a lot of plants I have never played with before. Here’s to beginning again!

Xx Casey

Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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This seems to be a kind of self-saucing pudding; a reinforcing cycle whereby I make a post extolling the virtues of tree planting, a bunch of people leave comments agreeing with me, and then maybe 1-2 people leave comments along the lines of ‘oh but what about the mess?’ or ‘yes but you’re forgetting about the BAD trees with invasive roots’. And they stoke my rage-fire once more and keep the furnace burning. And so I post again, and the whole glorious cycle continues.

It’s actually quite fun! I like getting riled up about things, and it’s helping me appreciate exactly how depressingly sub-par the prevailing Perth attitude is towards all the green things that make the oxygen we breathe.

The thing is, yesssssss there are SOME trees with big spreading root systems that will damage your pipes, there are SOME trees which drop limbs on a semi-regular basis. But god, when did gardening get so BORING??? We’re a nation of binge drinkers, gamblers, smokers, a portion of us make a yearly swim from Perth to Rottnest in SHARK INFESTED WATERS, we’re all chowing down on carcinogenic processed meats, driving our tin can cars down West Coast Highway staring out at the ocean not looking where we’re going and sedentarily rotting into our lounge suites on our iPhones every night and we’re worried about TREES???

If you missed my last tree rant (which largely focused on how most of the risks associated with ‘Big Trees’ are overblown), you can catch up here.

For today, I’m going to step down off my soap box and be a little bit more pragmatic. Because in addition to the positive comments and the negative comments on my tree posts, there are a lot of people who sit somewhere in the middle. They want to plant trees in their garden, but all of the fear mongering out there has made them hesitant and nervous. Or they belong to the camp of people who are paralysed by indecision and simply have no idea what will actually grow in hot, sandy Perth.

The short answer is that a tonne of incredible trees will grow beautifully here. But because I want everyone to shove a tree in their backyard this winter, I’m going to make it so undeniably easy that no one can refuse. I don’t know how many parts there will be in this series, because it depends how many nurseries hit me back, but for the next few weeks/months I’ll be peppering my Substack with tree recommendation posts, courtesy of some of my favourite nurseries and gardeners around Perth.

Starting with the cream of the crop, my favourite place to lose my head: Guildford Garden Centre (who, incidentally, have their bare root tree stock coming in soon, so if you want to get your hands on something fruity or deciduous, be sure to check it out).

Here are a curated collection of small, medium and large trees that the green thumbs at Guildford love. They won’t destroy your house or your footings or your pipes, and they’re raaaather delightful.

Read more

I have been ‘planning’. Planning means that I now have a folder on my computer called ‘BOOKBOOK’ (it’s going to be a real, hard copy gardening book, so it has earned the right to be called a book twice).

The BOOKBOOK folder contains files with other great titles such as ‘Book brainstorm’, ‘Book outline’, ‘New outline’, and the especially enigmatic ‘01’. There are also at least three Excel spreadsheets, sparsely populated with ideas and ruminations. There are untold numbers of phone notes and incoherent audio musings poorly auto-dictated that leave me sounding fairly deranged. Maybe this is how ideas percolate? Maybe this is how books are written? I have vague memories of reading authors’ quotes about the benefits of long walks, but surely at some point some actual words are going to have to come out of my head and onto a page.

That’s what this is. This is me whipping myself into shape because I am all clenched up about writing something really good, so I can’t get started. And I can’t make another Excel spreadsheet.

This book is set in four parts, aligned with the seasons. It’s autumn now and I just put a poll up on Instagram and four people told me to start with autumn and I’m nothing if not a gal who does what she’s told. So let’s start with autumn.

Note: My book drafts and excerpts are mostly going to be paywalled, if you are a paying subscriber - thank you so much for your support, it means a whole lot! <3 I would also (though it terrifies me) welcome your feedback. Am I waffling? Am I making myself useful? Do you want more of something I forgot to mention? Let me know!

As this is the very first excerpt, I am sending a preview to my free subscribers too.

MY BOOKBOOK (there will be a real title…eventually) | AUTUMN

May 2026

The first leaves have started falling off the trees with the air of tired guests leaving the party early. Slipping quietly out the back door, almost unnoticed, but for the rustle of their golden yellow coats and jackets. The pecan tree is crowded – filled with black Carnaby’s cockatoos who croon like giant gargoyles and snip pecan-laden branches off the tree with their secateur beaks.

Our baby is nearly one year old. The grass is wet, my hair is wiry and unkempt, although not as unkempt as the garden. In the bedroom, motes of dust float above us as she falls asleep, drowsily reaching for them, trying to grab them from the air. There are piles of books I want (in theory) to read, clothes I want (in theory) to fold, shoes that have no home. You sit still so long and vines climb over you, cobwebs. Everything needs a prune.

How long does it take to emerge from the newborn fog? I think no one knows, the same way you never know, when you’re given a general, how long you were under. A yawning hole opens up in the fabric of space-time, you dissociate, or something. There’s a deep, amnestic well you slip down into, one in which experiences are had, but not recorded. You watch every day, the beautiful ones and the harrowing ones, pass right in front of you, knowing that trying to grasp onto any of them is as futile as holding snow in the palm of your hand and thinking it won’t just turn to water and run away.

When you do emerge, you do it in increments. One day you wake from a night that was a little less broken. One day time blossoms out of nowhere and you find yourself pencilling in your eyebrows like its the most normal thing in the world. One day there is a moment to slip outside, and you cut back the salvias as if shearing a wild green sheep, holding great handfuls of stems and hacking off the tops. Quickly - quickly! Fling them to the ground like discarded wool!

The Dither

Three years earlier (April 2023)

There is an eclipse. My husband is out with our three-month-old son and I have time to garden. Except I can’t. I walk outside and stand there, limply, looking at this place that was once the source of so much creative energy. What can I do out here? How much time do I have, really? Twenty minutes? Thirty? So I could pull up a plant, but what then? What if time suddenly runs out and I have five different things lying on the ground, mid-way through transplanting, roots bare and withering.

I deadhead some roses, painfully aware that I am doing nothing with my time.

The moon passes in front of the sun. The dappled shadows under the pecan tree split into a thousand crescents. The air is so strangely cold. I miss the way I used to feel out here, and also, although he just left, I miss my baby.

Once upon a time I would garden for eight hours straight, I gardened in the fading light, I finished entire projects in a single day, or I did nothing but potter, for hours and hours and hours.

The earth turns. The air warms. The crescents slide away, and I hear the front gate open and close. Footsteps in the hall. The age of pottering is dead. Long live the potter.

Today.

The way I garden has changed. It had to change.

I’m fast now, I’m a hyena, I’m an opportunistic scavenger, chancing on the body of a zebra - still fresh - and tearing into it wildly; hungry and decisive. Time in the garden isn’t something I ask for because it can’t be planned; only our toddler and our baby and the universe have any inkling of when the moment will be right and they refuse to tell me in advance. But I’ve learnt, now, to sniff it out and leap without bargaining for time or permission. My husband knows when these moments bubble to the surface, and lets me grab them for however long they last. I keep my secateurs on top of the fridge. “I need to scratch an itch” I mutter covertly as I stride by him, not making eye contact with anyone lest I break the spell, the brown, dead flower heads of spent canna lilies the only thing on my mind.

***

When it comes to gardening in motherhood, The Dither is perhaps your greatest enemy. If you find yourself swamped by the sweeping paralytic sensation of having infinite possibilities and a vanishingly small amount of time in which to achieve them, you are not alone.

The trick, I’ve found, to overcoming the dither, is to separate the thinking in the garden from the doing in the garden. There is nothing more soul crushing than being on the clock and trying to triage all potential garden projects by order of importance and feasibility before actually beginning any of them. So don’t do that. Do all the thinking first.

You may not realise just how much gardening can be done in your mind, before you even get out of your pyjamas. It’s very simple - you just hang out in your garden, do nothing, and stare at everything a whole lot. You can relocate plants in your imagination, you can lay new paths, add trees, prune shrubs, sow seeds. You can watch how the light filters through branches, discover windy tunnels and calm, warm corners, and think about what will thrive in them.

The best part is, approaching your garden this way serves a dual purpose. Thinking about your garden - daydreaming - is actually wonderful when you aren’t pushed to reach some conclusion or decision on any set deadline. It can be interrupted by requests for glasses of milk. It can be returned to in the quiet darkness of a sleepless night. And if you do it often enough, you’ll begin to carry around a pre-made list of all the things you want to do, so that whenever the moment arises, whether you have fifty minutes, or five, you will know exactly what you want to do. And keep your secateurs on the fridge.

Practical steps to overcome the dither:

1. Begin to practise asking yourself questions about your garden, whenever you are out there. After a while these will come naturally, but here are a few to get you started

   1. What plants are looking happy? Which look sad?

   2. Can the happy plants be propagated? Could you rip a branch off one right now and shove it in a pot, see if it takes root?!

   3. Which plants look beautiful next to each other? Which ones compliment their neighbouring plants, and which don’t?

   4. Which areas of the garden feel nicest to be in? Any idea what is making them feel good?

   5. Where are there flowers? Where is bare?

   6. Where in your garden feels exposed? Could you add a tree there to enclose you in its canopy? What tree? How big?

   7. What is working best? A healthy plant? Something in bloom? A plant combination that is especially beautiful this season? Can you repeat what’s working so that it appears in every bed of the garden?

2. If notes are helpful, get yourself a notebook just for this practice. Jot down a anything you think of while in your garden. If I’m honest, I can’t even manage a notebook (my toddler would instantly co-opt it for his own garden musings - he has many; a lot of the currently involve chainsawing down our trees to harvest the unreachable fruits on the topmost boughs). I keep my notes in my brain where they undergo a rapid process of extreme natural selection; I forget nearly all of them and only the strongest survive.

3. At some point, a plant list is a good idea. Stick this on the fridge and add to it whenever you see something you would like to try growing. These plants can be ordered online, stealthy as a thief, in the quiet dead of night.

There is something else about keeping a working copy of your garden in your head. Something I find hard to put into words. The early years with children can be intense and all consuming - emotionally, logistically, physically. The days can be so beautiful, but if you sometimes find yourself gazing around, not quite recognising this new terrain, or yourself in it - me too.

And if some days oscillate from joy and hilarity to catastrophe and chaos, perhaps within minutes, there is something bolstering by having a little piece of untouchable land to garden in your mind. A reminder that through the highs and lows and the relentless unknowns, the world keeps turning, your trees keep growing, you are still there, you are not lost. Spring will always come, and it will bring daffodils.

***

There is another thing you are going to need to do to overcome the dither. You are going to need to drastically revise what you consider to be Good Enough Gardening.

The Good Enough Mother. The Good Enough Gardener.

(coming next…)

Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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In early winter its leaves turn to gold - it almost glows. The leaves tumble to the ground in gusts of wind. Last year, our toddler stood under the tree waiting for the leaves to fall, running to catch them before they hit the ground. He still talks about this. We teach him to count the months by the phases of the tree. It won’t be Christmas again until the leaves have yellowed, fallen, and returned.

In winter the pecan is a bare skeleton in the chill air. In October, delicate green, caterpillar-like catkins hang from its branches, and the garden shimmers with dappled shade. Soon after, the leaves fill out and we are thrown into a cool, deep green canopy of summer.

Now, it’s May, and the tree is dripping with plump shells that encase the nuts. Every May, Carnaby’s black cockatoos descend on our garden in droves. Sometimes there are fifty or more. They are big and brutish and loud. They sit in the branches and squawk, tip pruning the tree, sending nuts crashing to the ground.

Two of my neighbours hate this tree. The first, an older lady, resents the shade it casts on her garden. The other guy has a pool. Shortly after our daughter was born, in the hazy delirium that washes over you when you have a newborn with colic and are barely keeping your head above water, he treated me to many text-based updates on the state of his pool filter and the stains the nuts were leaving on the cement. Weirdly, the pool has been there for at least a decade and no previous owner has ever contacted me about the tree.

Our neighbours opposite recently sold their house. The new owners (who seem to spend half their time living elsewhere or else on a very big boat dragged behind a very big car) wasted no time in chainsawing down a 30-year-old poinciana that bloomed fire engine red every summer. Last week I noticed some desperate green buds erupting from the stump. I guess they’ll have to poison it now.

What is it about trees that is so polarising? I’m not sure. But I have more stories like these - a tonne more. And, as I post more and more online about the seemingly unique Perth attitude towards trees, I am becoming convinced that our hot, sun-blistered society is suffering under some form of mass delusion.

Perth just hates trees.

We hate them! We’re bored of them, we can’t be bothered with them, we misunderstand them, we don’t recognise them or we actively fear them. And, as a result, WA has the worst tree canopy cover in the country.

It’s so bad. It’s just so bad. Feast your eyes on this insane, blue sky dystopia, and see that we have strayed so very far from what is normal, what is healthy, what is good.

So many layers of irrationality have contributed to this situation. In today’s newsletter, I am going to attempt to unpack them and counter them, with the help of some local experts who have very kindly given me their time and their insights.

This is a free newsletter because i think it is information that every West Australian should read. If you are a subscriber, you can help me by sharing this newsletter as widely as you can (click the button below).

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And, because I now realise there is a lot to talk about, this is going to be a two part series. Today I’ll take a sweeping look at why trees are so beneficial, and I’ll address the major fears that have contributed to the current (treeless) state of affairs in Perth. Next week’s email will be practical - a list of the best trees to grow here, plus tips for positioning them and caring for them so they are happy, you are happy, and all those valuable pipes, footings and gutters are happy.

We’re all talking about the wrong things

The reason I’m writing this newsletter is I’ve become convinced that, when it comes to trees, we’re all talking about the wrong things. People with vested interests (developers, loggers, politicians), are capitalising on the fact that many of us don’t fully understand or appreciate the value of trees beyond the fact that ‘they’re shady’. Instead of acknowledging how beneficial and necessary they are, our focus has narrowed to things like clogged gutters and cracks in pavement. Which is very convenient if what you want is a society that views trees as a nuisance and doesn’t much mind if you chop them all down for your next suburb. The problem is, the ‘trees are an optional nuisance’ narrative is now so ubiquitous people have stopped questioning it.

I recently saw a post on gardening Australia (GARDENING AUSTRALIA) where a mayor and a property lawyer weighed in on the legalities of forcing a neighbour to remove their tree. The caption was “whether you’re worried about how old mate’s tree next door will hold up in the summer storms, or it’s just creating more work for you on the weekend, knowing where you stand can be helpful”.

WHAT THE FUCK????

THIS IS GARDENING AUSTRALIA!! EVEN GARDENING AUSTRALIA HAS DRUNK THE KOOL AID!!! We are up shit creek and we don’t have a paddle because paddles are made of wood and we chopped the last tree down months ago cos it was clogging the goddamn gutters.

At no point in this conversation do we seem to hear about the thing that is actually most relevant. So let’s start with that.

Whatever else trees may or may not do to our infrastructure (which we will get onto later in this article), they indisputably do a few things that are of interest if you are a land-dwelling species that enjoys being alive. Here is a shortlist you can share with the next person who tries to complain about ‘mess’.

A non-exhaustive list of all the reasons trees are good

Trees absorb carbon dioxide from their environment and produce oxygen. Little reminder: without oxygen all humans will be dead in three minutes. And I know we’re all not burning fuel anymore because there’s no petrol (oops!), but we also have that pesky little CO2 problem that’s still hanging around, destroying the biosphere. Trees are vitally important if we want to do anything about that.

Well-placed trees cool homes and gardens, reduce heat around walls and paving, and lower demand for air conditioning during summer. “The evidence on this is strong: shade trees reduce surrounding temperatures and can materially cut household energy use”, explains Dave Crispin, a consulting arborist for Treeswest Australia and the president, of ArbWest. “In a warming climate” he adds, “that makes backyard trees part of the solution, not the problem.

Tree roots direct rain water into the ground, reducing runoff and returning the water back into the earth (instead of directing it to storm water drains and out to the ocean). Not only do trees direct water back into the soil, they also help seed rain. It is well established that clouds gather and rain falls over forests, but even on a small, local scale, trees help precipitate rain through a process called bio-precipitation, whereby small particles released by the tree (bacterial spores, fungi and pollen) act as ‘condensation nuclei’ (they make the water vapour condense around them), triggering precipitation of rain from the surrounding atmosphere.

Tree-lined streets are associated with better mental health for residents and fewer instances of domestic violence (see here for more information). Our brains respond positively to the green wavelengths of light that reflect off tree leaves (green light therapy has even been shown to reduce the incidence of migraines, although of course, now you can buy a lightbulb that does that too).

Trees beautify suburbs, increasing property prices. Where do you think all those wealthy developers who ‘cleanslate’ (remove all trees from) new developments live? Ok actually, I’ve just piqued my own interest. Let’s find out.

Without getting myself into trouble for being too nosy, a cursory look online confirms that two of WA’s most prominent property developers enjoy residences in Swanbourne (tree canopy cover of 16%) and Peppermint Grove (canopy cover of 23%). For reference, Allara in Eglinton, an estate built recently by the Satterley group, has a canopy cover of 5%, and Alkimos, the suburb right next door, boasts a leafy, lush canopy cover of 1%.

We should all be so, so angry.

Anyway, trees offer still more benefits, so let me continue.

Trees provide shelter, food and housing for wildlife. These native animals are increasingly pushed out of our suburbs into the bush (which is being logged too). Dispossessed of their homes, their population declines are unsurprising, inevitable and very sad.

“If you live in a coastal suburb, trees also help disperse energy from the ocean wind” (this is environmental scientist Luke Winkler talking now). “When you have areas that are solid, continuous surfaces, they tend to channel and intensify wind like water flowing through rapids. Our neighbourhoods are the same - wind is being channelled and compressed down streets between houses, creating heavy gusts of wind that strip topsoil (the skerrick that we have in Perth), and remove moisture as well”.

They also help prevent heat islands. “Heat island effects are not just that it’s hotter during the day”, Luke continues, “it’s that concrete, bitumen and rock are storing that heat like a battery and releasing it at night. This means that cool relief when the sun goes down is delayed by hours. It’s baking soils with limited reprieve and most Perth residents are living in small lots largely consisting of sand. When you combine those two factors of heat islands and wind you can see why we have such a hard time gardening in metro areas - especially in suburbs without mature canopies. We live in a climate with minimal ambient humidity as it is, evaporation is already high and we fuel it further by the way we develop. The cooling benefit of shade trees goes beyond your immediately being out of the sun, it’s influencing the environment you’re in, keeping everything cooler”.

For what it’s worth, none of the above could be true, and I’d still be a massive advocate for trees simply because they are beautiful and life enhancing. When asked directly, most people will agree that trees are a good thing. The problem isn’t that we don’t know this. The problem is that someone has befuddled us all into focusing on the ways trees inconvenience us and the various (usually overstated) risks they pose to infrastructure.

As with Gardening Australia, the conversation turns to petty grievances, and we all forget that until yesterday we were an arboreal animal who lived among the trees. That without them, we are dead. That without them, life is stark, concreted and inhuman.

But they make such a mess

Alright. Let’s look at the grievances.

The issues people have with tress typically boil down to a handful of concerns.

• Invasive roots getting into pipes

• Damage to the footings of houses or boundary walls

• Limbs dropping

• Leaf litter, clogged gutters, and mess

Invasive roots & damage to footings/walls

Of all tree-related concerns, people seem most afraid of roots. Maybe because they operate below ground, where we can’t see what they’re up to. Following my discussions with several arborists, scientists and engineers, I can say with confidence: the trees aren’t up to very much. In fact, no matter who I spoke to, I found myself hearing the same story.

“Backyard trees are far too often treated as a liability when, in reality, many of the fears people repeat about them are exaggerated or poorly understood”, Dave Crispin tells me. “In my experience as a consulting arborist, the idea that roots routinely smash sound walls or properly constructed footings is overstated. Roots are opportunistic, not malicious. Where problems do occur, they are often linked to pre-existing defects, reactive soils, or poor construction detail rather than a tree simply “breaking” good infrastructure. The same applies to underground pipes. Roots usually enter pipes where there are already faults such as cracks, failed joints or poor installation; it is extremely unlikely for roots to damage intact pipework”.

Alexis, an arborist who works for the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, agrees. “People over-exaggerate root intrusion” he says. “I was on a job once where the owner of a property was adamant tree roots pushed over his fence - it was raised on the far side and ground level their side. I can’t remember what species it was but it was small and no way it pushed the fence over. I suggested it was actually poor construction. He was furious, but an engineer from the City was also there and agreed”. It’s the same deal with pipes, Alexis tells me; “most of the time it’s because the pipe is already cracked and/or water is leaking from a poor join”.

You might wonder, at this point, if I’m only speaking to arborists who love trees so much they’re refusing to see their nefarious side. Not so. Grant Perkins is a structural engineer who works with arborists on tree root damage to buildings, and his perspective tallies with Dave and Alexis. “A lot of people who aren’t in the building industry see quite minor cracks in their house and their minds just start racing” he says. “‘There’s a tree in the yard outside the wall where the crack is, so that must be the problem’, you know? When I get there and investigate we often find either a) the cracks are so small as to not be worth worrying about, or b) we’re able to identify some other cause of the cracks which isn’t the tree”

The main takeaway here, for me, is what Dave said: Roots are opportunistic, not malicious. Tree roots aren’t targeting our pipes and infrastructure, and they pose very little threat to infrastructure that is intact. If we want to be less afraid of trees, we need to think like a tree - all trees really want to do is send their roots outward in search of water and nutrients, and, over time, to get bigger. They aren’t looking to put a vice grip around your sewage pipes and crush them; the reason they may invade pipes is if there is already a leak - the root follows the leak of water and heads for the source. Similarly, the only way you’re likely to damage your pipes is if you put a large tree directly on top of them, leaving it no other option than to grow around the pipes. Given any other option, tree roots are going to grow into soil; they aren’t going to determinedly wrap around pipes that aren’t already broken and leaking.

“Even if a tree does end up causing a problem, there are often solutions that don’t involve removing the tree” (this is Grant again), “usually you can cut the offending roots and install a root barrier below the ground to protect the structure, and leave the tree be”.

“Removing a tree can actually cause different problems”, he continues, “because if the tree’s no longer there drinking moisture out of the ground, the soil moisture changes and the soil starts behaving differently to what the building is used to. Sometimes this causes totally new cracks to appear”.

Instead of removing trees entirely, or battling them, there are simple things you can do to to encourage them to direct their roots in optimal directions - namely, give them space. Cracks in pavement tend to appear when trees are forced to grow in confined areas - their roots are pushed up and out, rather than allowed to grow deep. Give your trees room to breathe, placing them a minimum of 2m away from a boundary fence, and most trees will pose very little threat to your walls, pavers or foundations. Our giant pecan is probably 15m-20m tall and it’s roughly 3m from our fence. I have never had any trouble whatsoever with its roots.

Limbs dropping

“As for fears about limb drop, the sensible response is proper species selection, inspection and maintenance — not blanket anxiety about every tree in every backyard” (that’s Dave Crispin again). “Any living structure needs care, but that does not make trees dangerous by default”.

Sometimes trees drop limbs, it’s true. However, as with the fears about invasive roots, these are a) often overblown or b) have a workable solution that doesn’t involve removing the tree - usually enlisting an arborist who can take a look at the tree and see right away if there’s any part of it that is structurally unsound. These branches can be removed.

It’s worth noting that there are plenty of beautiful trees that rarely drop limbs. The pecan in our garden has never dropped a large branch, while the coral trees on our street often do. As Dave says, species selection is key. In Part 2 of this series, I will be recommending a bunch of trees that are less susceptible to limb drop, so if that is something that concerns you, stay tuned (and make sure to subscribe!).

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Leaf litter, clogged gutters, and mess

Now the last three tree whinges. And I’m bundling these together and calling them whinges, not concerns because that’s the most you can possibly call them.

“(These) complaints are even harder to take seriously” says Dave Crispin. “Leaf drop is not a defect - it is part of living with a garden. Sweeping up leaves now and then is a small trade-off for the shade, comfort and beauty that trees provide”.

Here, for the most part, I think we just need to adjust our attitudes.

Actually, first you can employ the other tactics I’ve already described. You can select species that don’t shed much of whatever it is that annoys you (bark, fruits, nuts, whatever). Second, you can position your tree with leaf drop in mind. Plant it 2-3m away from your house. Plant it within a garden bed, so the organic matter it drops can become mulch that feeds your soil.

Finally, accept that you are making a necessary trade off: you are accepting a little chaos, some minor struggle, in the name of a life that is richer and more deeply human. Nature is not static. Trees grow, leaves fall. We need to find a way to accept this as a simple truth, not something we relentlessly try to engineer our way out of. Falling leaves aren’t a problem to solve, just as needing to sleep, eat, and move our own bodies aren’t problems to solve.

Living things change, develop and need care. The trade off we make, when we refuse to accept this, is to surround ourselves with lifelessness; with inorganic, pale simulacrums of living things. With ‘grass’ that is made of plastic and burns in the sun. With metal walls that border our backyards and reflect the sun’s harsh glare so that we don’t even want to go out there in summer. We choose to sit inside and watch Attenborough document the lives of birds on screen, instead of simply growing thing that allow real birds into our gardens.

We do all this in the name of avoiding mess and ‘work’. But what scraps are we accepting in return? Put some music on, invest in a nice rake, get yourself a cup of tea, collect the autumn leaves in a bag in the golden sunlight, let them break back down into mulch. Sometimes the ‘work’ of life turns out to be life. And even if it doesn’t fill you with peace or satisfaction, consider the alternative: do we want our children to grow up in a world of stark, bare concrete, or one that is alive in the breeze, filled with birdsong, with dappled shade to play under, and a connection to the natural world that - though we hate to admit it - we remain very much a part of?

Thank you for reading! See you next time for more Lo fi life!

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One was leaning casually against the car, the other had the engine idling while they discussed whatever it was. I stared at them, knowing that they had absolutely no idea that I was there, or that what they were doing was so astonishing to me. It looked like the most peaceful thing in the world.

It has been three years since I have had an unhurried conversation through a car window. But I didn’t realise until I saw them.

I have had several of these very specific and peculiar instances of astonishment since having children. I experience them in a bemused way, as if encountering a strange and beautiful zoo creature through a thick pane of glass. A woman lies down on the grass in the sunshine and rests for an unspecified amount of time. Another strolls up the street with an unopened bottle of chilled fizzy wine in her hand. A couple lie on a blanket, scrolling through cinema schedules, debating what movie to see that evening.

To be clear, I’m not jealous of these people - not exactly. The arrival of our son, and then our daughter, has filled my life with a kind of superlative richness and intensity that is unmatched. It’s like seeing in colour for the first time. Sure, sometimes the light blinds you, but the alternative, though objectively simpler, is now unimaginable.

But I can’t help myself staring.

What these people have - that I lack - is the blissful unawareness of just how expansive, uninterrupted and flexible their time is. And maybe I’m just doing motherhood wrong and if I changed five things on some blogger’s list I could experience that too. Only I don’t think so. The phase of my life I am now in is both faster and slower in ways that I find hard to name. And I don’t think there’s much that can be done to change that, and I’m not even sure I need to.

But, what I have noticed, is that the fast-slowness of motherhood is much more manageable (dare I say enjoyable?) when your physical environment isn’t full of mess.

Side note: I have only been able to notice this thanks to my husband, who, in fatherhood, has reached new heights of efficiency, optimisation and determination when it comes to keeping our house clean and tidy. Without him I would be swimming in a perpetual sea of yoghurt encrusted Duplo, with dog hair and chia seeds permanently stuck to any exposed flesh and unscalable mountains of unwashed clothes and dishes pouring from the cesspit I call a house.

The garden might still look nice though!

And that is what I want to talk about today. If your physical environment has a way of directing the valence of your mood, and you have young children, and your garden feels like a chaotic, wild and cluttered shambles that you can never hope to fix, it’s only normal to want to close the door and never go out there. But that would be such a shame! Especially as you don’t actually need to do THAT much to make it nice again.

Whether you have a young family and no time, or work a busy job and have no time, or just exist in the modern world and so have no time, these tips will help make you feel better about your garden in as few moves as possible.

I can’t promise you’ll be leaning into a car window chatting about whether you should bring that guy you’ve just started hanging out with to the weekend away or if that’s coming on to strong (just DO it you’ll be old and haggard soon enough anyway!!), and I haven’t solved the riddle of how to find five unbroken minutes to lie on your back in the sun. But I can help you walk out into an uncluttered garden that inspires you with hope. And that’s something.

How to declutter your garden*

A guide for the tired, the (time) poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

*Organised from quickest and easiest to hardest/slowest

Mulch everything!

The fastest way to make your garden make sense is to mulch it. Not only is mulching really good for soil improvement (I recommend using lupin mulch), it also makes your garden look SO much tidier instantly. Do it in stages, a bag at a time if you need to - starting with the first beds you see when you walk out the door.

In a chaotic or cluttered garden, I find that mulching also helps you work out what plants to shift/get rid of. Once your garden is mulched, the plants pop out against the backdrop of mulch. There are no random weeds, straggling leaves or branches sitting on top of the soil to confuse the eye, so the whole thing looks less chaotic and it’s easier to see which plants are making your garden good, and which are detracting (or simply in the wrong spot).

Hardscape

The next big bang-for-your-buck way to address chaos in your garden is to not do any gardening at all. Instead, insert one or two clever (big) pieces of inorganic material into the wild, tangled mess of the garden.

Big inorganic things (bird baths, urns, archways, pots) do so much work in a garden to reduce the feeling of clutter. They help add a focal point that your eye is drawn to, provide weight and structure that contrasts nicely with tangled plants, and they somehow manage to transform that feeling of neglected wilderness into something more romantic and secret - as though you’ve stumbled upon a garden in an ancient ruin, rather than just a rundown mess you haven’t been able to get to for six months.

Here are a few examples of how you can use hardscaping materials to declutter your garden:

1. Pop a big, rustic terracotta urn in the middle of an otherwise formless patch of grass to create a focal point. This creates order in the chaos and make your garden feel more put together.

2. Add a metal archway to separate one section of garden from the next - even if the garden isn’t fully planted or is a bit messy, adding archways gives vertical structure that can make up for a lot of clutter.

3. Add a table and chairs away from the house to build the feeling that your garden has a destination to move towards - the eye will focus on this, rather than the clutter that surrounds it. Put a pot of spring bulbs on the table (it’s not too late to plant daffodils!)

4. Birdbaths are also great for adding a bit of weight and structure to a section of garden that feels cluttered, and have the added bonus that you can shuffle them around - as you neaten up one section the bird bath can be shuffled off to another section, bringing a sense of order with it wherever it goes.

Beautify just two square metres.

Your whole garden doesn’t have to be beautiful, and certainly not all at once. I usually have a section of the garden I am happy with, and countless others that are just so-so or need work. You really can get just as much enjoyment out of working on a small patch of a bigger garden and throwing everything you’ve got at it. You’ll find your mind starts to focus on the section that you’re working on, and the rest of the clutter fades into the background. Who cares if there’s a dodgy area by the back shed when you have a beautiful bed filled with sage, thyme, marjoram and marigolds right by your back door.

The best approach here, I think, is to choose whatever part of your garden first attracts your attention (or frustrates you) when you head outside. Force yourself not to take on a job that is too big to do to your satisfaction. Measure out two square meters if you have to. And then get to work on optimising that one spot.

You could set a table and chairs there, buy a few terracotta pots and fill them with primulas, pansies and grape hyacinths. You could get a candle for the table, or cushions for the chairs, an umbrella to shade you on sunny days. You could choose a single garden bed and plant it fully, improving the soil and filling it with flowers as you go. There’s something kind of beautiful about an oasis of ordered beauty amid chaos. Build yourself an oasis.

Add tactical flowers in pots.

You don’t have to have a whole garden full of flowers. Your garden can look more intentional and ordered if you make a few beautiful pots (with vincas, violas, pansies or spring bulbs) and dot them around amid the chaos. Choose the same plants and spread them across several smaller pots - dotting these around your garden will create a sense of repetition and cohesion.

When I have a garden bed that is looking a bit rough and chaotic, I’ll often take one big terracotta pot, fill it with potting mix and plonk it in the middle of the bed, filled with potted colour (petunias or portulaca for a sunny position, vincas or violas for a shadier spot, and spring bulbs if the season is right). The big pot instantly catches your eye, and if you’ve planted it with a little burst of colour or some neat bulbs it will make the chaos around it fade into the background.

Plant trees (or even just one tree).

Small plants often add to the feeling of chaos in a garden, leaving it bitty and cluttered. Big plants typically do the opposite. And what’s bigger than a tree!?

Trees are a great option for busy, overworked people who dream of gardens. But busy, overworked people don’t usually think of planting trees when they think of gardening, because panting trees feels like A Big Thing. So instead they go to the nursery and get a handful of small plants - low pressure plants - that don’t actually fill the garden, don’t give it structure, and often just die when the weather heats up.

If you have no time for a garden, TREES are the answer. They just need one day of focused energy (if that), and irrigation.

Trees will help declutter your garden because, once you have trees, the smaller plants are less essential for making your garden feel planted and full. The little plants turn into a ‘nice to have’ addition rather than a necessity.

We are heading into winter and now is the absolute best time to get trees in the ground - winter rains will water them, they’ll establish well and be off to a good start. PLANT SOME TREES. Even if you think you don’t have the time, plant some trees. Even if you don’t know exactly what you want to plant, or where to put it, plant some trees. Perth needs trees.

And once you’ve planted them, trees will largely grow on their own. They will do the work of beautifying your garden for you - filling it with dappled light and birdsong, and asking nothing in return.

Embrace perennial plants!

If your garden is cluttered, perennial plants are your new best friends. These are plants that live 2 years or more (as opposed to annuals that live only one season). Annuals make a garden messy - they can be gorgeous, exuberant and interesting, but they do not provide the structure that keeps a garden ordered. Perennials give your garden its structure, so if things are looking unkempt and you feel like you can’t keep on top of what you’re growing, pivot hard into the perennials.

Since having our kids I have slowly been replacing almost all of my annuals with perennials. Now the only annuals that grow are those that self seed on their own. Perennials grow larger than most annuals, and bigger plants help avoid a chaotic looking garden. They also require less maintenance and tend to be more drought-tolerant once established. A perennial garden is much easier to maintain than a garden full of annuals, but annuals are what most people tend to buy when they’re starting out.

If you are a paying subscriber, I’m going to wrap this newsletter up with a list of seven of my favourite perennials for a Perth garden (below the paywall). These are the pretty, tough and reliable perennials that have helped beautify my garden through motherhood, when I’ve had so much less time out there. A lot of these plants feature in my new ebook, The Perth Plant Palette (it’s out next month! You can join the waitlist to grab it as soon as it’s out by heading here).

The rest come from my book A Year in Blooms - a guide to filling Perth gardens with flowers that bloom all year round - it features over 100 of my favourite plants to grow for flowers, plus ideas for how to layer and combine them in your garden (you can grab that one here).

My 7 favourite perennials for a Perth garden

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Time.

Time fundamentally changes so many aspects of a garden. It takes a while for things to settle. For hardscaping materials to weather, fade and blur into the landscape. For trees to grow into the spaces you’ve planted them. For birds to reliably add your garden to their foraging route. For the canopy to expand, for bulbs to begin to multiply underground and for you, the gardener, to really get a feel for what works and what doesn’t in this particular space.

If there are no shortcuts, why am I telling you this?

Firstly, because I want you to plant some trees this winter. The best thing you can do to invest in the future beauty and resilience of your garden (and your suburb, and our state, and the planet) is to chuck some trees in. Trees give so much to a garden - seclusion, privacy, a sense of being enclosed by nature. They protect your garden, they are its walls, foundations, bones. Without them, gardens tend to feel overly horizontal, flat and exposed - we need the verticality of trees, we need their height and their sturdy stature. If you plant trees, you’ll get all of that.

BUT (!!) not without time.

There’s not really any way you can shortcut this process. And I’d recommend against trying to cheat the system by buying mature trees. Mature trees create an instant effect in your garden, but they almost never establish as well as a baby tree would. Young trees, plonked into position, are able to send their roots roaming through the soil undisturbed. This makes them more secure in the earth (less likely to get battered around by the wind) and their broader root systems mean they are healthier than trees that have been ripped up from their home and shoved somewhere else. What’s more, the baby trees usually catch up in height to the big trees after a few years. Go for the baby trees and then give them time.

If you’re a paying subscriber (thank you!), below the paywall you’ll find three of my favourite trees for a Perth garden - this is an excerpt from a guidebook I’m working on called the Perth Plant Palette; a capsule wardrobe of reliable Perth plants for your garden, with a bunch of my favourite trees, shrubs, edibles, climbers and bulbs, and recipes for how you can combine them to achieve different garden styles. If you’d like to join the waitlist to grab the guidebook when it comes out, you can do so here.

The other reason I’ve decided to rant about time today is that it is something a lot of gardeners forget about.

You see these gorgeous gardens online and you wonder why you seem incapable of creating something like that in your own backyard. You can’t even quite pinpoint WHAT it is that makes them so beautiful. You might even be growing the same collection of plants in your garden, and yet… something feels…off.

It’s time.

Look at the baby olive tree, and now look at the 3000 year old olive tree. Time has etched itself all over the old tree. It has worked its way into the gnarled trunk, into its eccentricities and protrusions. It’s beautiful because it can’t be faked. You don’t need to wait 3000 years for the beauty to emerge, but just don’t forget the impact that time is making on what you grow. The same - by the way - is true of garden materials that weather gracefully and become more beautiful with time.

There are two tricks here.

The first is not to judge your garden against older gardens. These things take time, and whenever you find yourself comparing your garden unfavourably to another one, ask if the other garden might simply have the advantage of being older.

The second trick is to intentionally plant a garden that will grow more beautiful with time. This means adding trees, but it also means choosing materials that age well.

Avoid the ‘perfect’, white, minimalist modern stuff that is so often for sale from landscaping suppliers these days. Eschew the plastic pots (they look like junk as soon as the sun really hits them), go for real materials made of real STUFF. Wood. Metal. Stone. These things will not only last in your garden, they will grow more beautiful the longer you hold onto them.

There is no ultimate goal when growing a garden. There is no finish line, so don’t try to rush to the end - you won’t find anything there of any value if you do. Settle into the process, to the lifetime of growing a garden. And if you’re really impatient to see your garden mature into something beautiful, have a few kids - they do wonders for making time start to pass unnervingly fast (or maybe it’s the sleep deprivation? Either way).

Three trees to plant in Perth this winter

Now, let’s talk about a few trees that grow more and more beautiful with time. What follows is an excerpt from my new guide, The Perth Plant Palette (coming out this winter - you can join the waitlist here).

Read more

I didn’t used to be this bloody ignorant but in the last nine months I have been primarily concerned with being available 24/7 physically and emotionally to two small beings, while somehow maintaining the illusion that I am also running a successful gardening business. The latter activity takes up all of my baby’s nap time. She sleeps, I open my computer, smash at the keys writing thoughts about mango trees and intermittently asking AI to tell me the next job on my ever-growing task list because to save my soul I can’t keep track (and also I like the sycophantic praise it gives me whenever I tick a job off the list).

That’s all I do with my non-parenting time. Her eyes open, I scoop her up, we go find her brother and her dad and… we all do a lot of Duplo. I have been doing so, so much Duplo.

Point is, I am having a very odd, detached experience of what is afoot. Of rocketing petrol prices, of uncertainty, of the infinite and macabre strangeness of old men flinging missiles at each other and setting oil reserves alight. It’s like living inside the crib notes version of the apocalypse.

I’m figuring that perhaps, in the face of this chaos (over which we have exactly zero control) we might all want to just log off and grow a bit of food??

It is very hard to feed yourself (sorry!)

Let’s start with the bad news. It is very, very hard to keep yourself alive if you eat only from your own suburban garden. A handful of people manage it - I have some friends who only buy onions from the supermarket; their garden is huge and their gardening skills are prodigious.

I’m sorry to say this because I truly don’t want to deter anyone. But it would be dishonest for me to pretend otherwise, and also I kind of think more people get put off gardening when their beautiful fantasies crash hard into the less romantic realities of growing food. If you are a beginner gardener feeling crappy because you can’t feed yourself from your patch, please know that if I were trying to eat out of my garden this month, I would have eaten 50 mangoes, one lime, 3 chillies, and a lot of parsley and basil. And I would be very hungry.

When the pandemic hit and there was a run on plant nurseries for veggie seedlings, I couldn’t help but wonder who was buying them, and what exactly they were expecting. Did they know how long it was going to take before these tiny, weeny plants produced anything even vaguely resembling food? And did they know how small and insignificant the quantity of food was likely going to be, relative to what a typical human needs to eat to stay alive? I feared they would become - very quickly - quite bored and quite, quite hungry.

But the pandemic did something I hadn’t expected. People stayed home, people worried about stocking their pantries and veggie drawers, and people began to remember the value of gardening. Whether or not they grew enough food to sustain them wasn’t the point. The pandemic caused a surge in gardening interest, and I am certain a few of those people who started gardens in the autumn of 2020 are gardening still. That is only a good thing. If all this global nastiness has a silver lining, I hope that it is, again, a return to the garden.

So, let’s agree that we are probably not going to be living off our gardens anytime soon. And let’s agree that total self sufficiency isn’t the goal. Maybe one day, sure. Maybe for some. But let’s not pin all our hopes on that from the start. Let’s start small. What is the best way to approach edible gardening if you:

1) Want to eat regularly from your garden, and

2) Want to save a bit of money in a fuel crunch?

Start with the easiest edibles

I’m convinced that 99% of us approach edible gardening the wrong way. We start with traditional veggies (broccoli, sweetcorn, carrots etc), because when we think of veggie gardening, that’s what comes to mind. But these are annual veggies (they only fruit once then die), and they are fussy. Bugs like to eat them, they are thirsty plants, they need good soil, care and attention.

The easiest edibles to start with are tough perennials. Herbs, fruit trees and a few other plants that I’ll get into in a tic.

Because we’re looking at how the fuel crisis will affect our food, a few points:

Foods that are most affected by fuel prices are those that:

1) have a short shelf life, and

2) have to travel a long way to get here.

That means the best things you can do now are to grow the things that perish quickly on supermarket shelves and to eat seasonally to limit your food miles. You can also focus on buying things with long shelf lives as these are less affected by the price of fuel AND you can buy them in bulk. I plan to do all three and treat it as an exercise in living more economically, more sustainably, and gardening more tactically.

First, grow herbs

Herbs won’t keep you alive in an apocalypse, but probably neither will your carrot crop. What herbs will do is vastly improve the flavour and quality of any canned or dried foods you add them to. And, because fresh herbs perish quickly on supermarket shelves, they’ll be most affected by fuel price surges. Also, herbs from the supermarket taste like trash.

Here are a few to grow this autumn/winter (all work in pots or in-ground), and then some ideas for combining them with shelf stable items that won’t be as affected by price hikes:

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…Or at least, we think we are.

Today, I put it to you that most of us actually do have the time to grow a beautiful garden, but that we waste 95% of our energy on the wrong things. We throw ourselves into the jobs we think need doing, exhaust ourselves in the process, then life intervenes, we begin to neglect our gardens, and they frizzle and flop and die. And we think ‘oh well, gardens need so much time, gardens need so much energy, and I have neither the time time nor the energy, so I guess I can’t grow a garden’. You totally can. You’re just neglecting it in all the wrong ways.

There are two ways to neglect your garden, and only one of them works.

Case in point: last night I went on gardening reddit and saw a post from a guy asking for advice on his garden. He even posted photos. The garden was a 2x3m patch of dirt, surrounded by colour bond fencing. He’d planted it with a few lonely little islands of lavender and a tree. He said it was irrigated and he was wondering why his lavender was wilting and if he should be watering more. In between every plant there was at least 1m of empty space. There was no edging; there were no garden beds. This garden is - I’m sorry - probably not going to make it.

But think about it: this guy had the energy to go online, to take photos of his garden, to post about it, to worry about his wilting lavender. He has all the motivation, but he’s directing it to all the wrong things!

This is what I see happening again and again. Most people - understandably - do not have the energy to grow perfectly manicured, perfectly planned and executed gardens. (I certainly don’t). But they do have enough energy to grow good, beautiful gardens, if they just point that energy in the right direction. Instead, the typical information beginner gardeners get overcomplicates processes and adds a tonne of inessential work that absolutely does not need to be done if you are short on time. You do not need to prune your roses. You barely need to tie up your tomatoes. You don’t need to pinch out your sweet peas or even help them onto the climbing frame. You do not need to worry about aphids or caterpillars. For the most part, you don’t even need to weed your garden.

If you are short on time but you want to grow a beautiful garden, direct your energy into four key areas:

Your soil.

You can get away with so very much in your garden if you just put energy into getting your soil healthy. When your soil isn’t healthy, your plants grow slowly, succumb to bug attack and never take up enough space to make your garden look good.

When your soil is healthy and holds onto water, you can bung plants in and (provided you’ve picked the right kind of plants) they sort of take care of themselves. If you live in Perth and would like help turning your desert sand/builders’ rubble into actual soil, I have a guide that walks you through the process (it also comes with an instructional video showing you every step). You can get the guide here.

Basic landscaping.

This reddit guy didn’t have any garden beds - he didn’t have any garden layout. He was unknowingly creating so much more work for himself by not starting with any kind of defined garden. If you’re going to improve your soil (and you really should) then you need garden beds for the soil to go into, and you need to put edging around those beds.

Edging keeps all the good healthy soil inside and stops grass from creeping in. It also helps make your garden look like, well, a garden.

You don’t need to obsess over this part too much. You don’t need to create an entire garden layout and you certainly don’t need to start drawing birds eye view designs on paper. You can just add a 1m+ deep garden bed all around the perimeter of your garden, and use salvaged materials (old bricks, pavers, limestone blocks, sleepers) to edge it.

Defining garden beds helps define your area to focus on too. If you have a large garden or very little time to work on it, just choose one small area and create a bed there, improve the soil and work on making that one small spot beautiful.

Choosing plants that want to grow in your garden.

Here’s an example of someone doing all the wrong things with all the best intentions. Let’s call her Mary. Mary has a bare block and wants to grow a garden. She goes to some big garden centre, buys four bags of ‘soil improver’ at $3 a pop, gets excited and splurges on some hydrangeas, begonias and hostas, and further blows the budget on soil wetter, liquid fertilisers, a little plastic thing that tells her if her soil is dry, some plastic trowels, some pesticide spray, snail pellets and a pack of sunflower seeds. She heads home spreads a thin schmeer of soil improver over every bed, plants the plants, sows the seeds, sits back and waits for the garden of her dreams to emerge.

Oh Mary. Mary Mary Mary, how does your garden grow?

It doesn’t.

First of all, let me refer you to job 1 - actually fixing your soil. A thin layer of soil improver will not improve anything. Blowing your budget on soil wetters (which are little more than detergents) and liquid fertilisers will also make no difference to Perth soil and certainly won’t help keep your plants alive.

Then there’s the plants. SO MANY plants lining the shelves at Bunnings and the like look pretty but just hate Perth. And if you’re a beginner gardener it is very difficult to know which plants are morally opposed to growing here (I have a guide coming out in a few months that will help with that - it’s called the Perth Plant Palette. It’s like a capsule wardrobe of plants ideally suited to a Perth garden, and you can join the waitlist here if you’d like to grab a copy when it comes out).

If you are going to put your effort into anything apart from soil and basic layout, it is choosing plants that want to grow in your garden. Local native plants, plants from South Africa, California and the Mediterranean are all ideally suited to Perth’s climate and will grow here despite your neglect. Plant those.

And if you have little time to spend on your garden, direct it to one kind of plant: trees. Plant trees before you worry about anything else. You’ll have less to water and you’ll be investing in a garden that only gets better with age. As your trees grow you’ll have shade, bird life and a better environment into which you can then add more plants. Plants that want to be there.

Irrigation.

Last, irrigation. You don’t HAVE to irrigate your garden, but everything will be easier if you do. If you have a small garden, a potted courtyard garden, a cactus garden, or a garden planted exclusively with plants endemic to our region, you might get away with hand watering. Anything else needs water.

If you improve your soil but don’t water it, your soil will turn back into sand. No matter how good you’ve been about adding manure and compost and all the good stuff. Perth just does that to soil. This is probably true for anywhere on the planet where the soil is coastal and largely made of sand, but it is particularly true for Perth. Water is what turns the mulch you add into a layer of healthy, organic top soil. It is what helps keep earthworms happy and keeps the good microbes in your soil alive.

Forget the rest

Once you have put your energy into those four things, there is soooo much else that you can neglect. Here’s a list of things you can entirely forget about, while still having a thriving-and-beautiful-if-slightly-wild garden.

1. Pest control. Healthy plants do their own pest control and if you leave the bugs in your garden alone for a year or two they will arrive at their own equilibrium, where predatory bugs keep the smaller bugs in check. Don’t bother with pesticides they just make things worse.

2. Weeding. If you regularly mulch your garden (I like lupin mulch) you will stamp out most of the common weeds. The mulch covers the seeds and inhibits most of them from germinating. The exceptions to this are things that spread via underground roots (runners), like couch grass. Rip those out entirely before you start.

3. Pruning. Most plants don’t care whether or not you prune them. Do it if you want to, but I routinely forget to prune my roses and they are just fine.

4. Fussing and fiddling. So many things go in this category. I’d say 90% of the garden advice you read online falls into this category. Compost teas, starting seeds in punnets, MAKING LITTLE FAKE WHITE CABBAGE BUTTERFLIES TO SCARE OFF THE REAL ONES (!!!!!). Again, you can do it if you want, if you have the time and the inclination. But none of it matters much if you haven’t already directed the vast majority of your energy to the four main areas mentioned. Also cabbage white butterflies are, and will always be, lovely.

There are so many ways you can neglect your garden once it has healthy soil, some kind of basic layout, irrigation and plants that want to be there (especially trees). Take it from me - my garden has never been so neglected in the last decade, but we have two young kids and I haven’t done anything out there in months apart from hastily plant three coreopsis plants while our baby protested my lack of attention very loudly.

The garden is fine. It’s in its wild era. It is experiencing the definition of benign neglect, and heading out there still calms my nerves and makes me feel hopeful and inspired.

So here is my permission to neglect your garden too. Just make sure you’re neglecting it in the right ways.

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And I was thinking about a cartoon I saw recently. On the eve of my birthday, actually. Just as I was getting ready to go to sleep and wake up older. A bear holds up a gift-wrapped parcel and the caption reads ‘sometime between your 35th birthday and your 45th birthday, you will receive a special gift… an invisibility cloak’.

Well, fuck.

I know what it’s supposed to be saying, that as you age there is a liberation in not having to play the game anymore, in not being pressured to be pretty or to look a certain way. You’re old, so give up, and enjoy the perks of anonymity. Maybe now you can, at last, truly be yourself.

Only I don’t really think that becoming invisible is especially liberating. And I thought I was already being myself. To me, this all sounds a lot like being ignored and trying to find a way to convince yourself that you like it. And, call me crazy, but I don’t think this drawing was made for men, none of whom seem to be turning into wallflowers with the passing of the years (hi, Donald).

We like to say that women become invisible as they age, because so much of our value has, for so long, been tied up in how we look. And because the world at large refuses to admit that anything but the supple naivety of youth can be beautiful in a woman. Well, to the world at large, I say two words: Joanna Lumley.

Joanna Lumley refuses to be dulled or diminished with age. Why? I’ll tell you. She loves everything. She talks with a wistful astonishment, as though she is continuously shocked that the world is full of wonderful things, everywhere she looks. She sees all the beauty around her, revels in it, and somehow absorbs it and so is beautiful too. And I don’t mean superficially beautiful, although she is. She is vibrant - she buzzes. And she is absolutely not invisible.

There is something about embracing invisibility that, to me, feels like an admission of defeat. Like saying that at 36 (or 46, or 56) your life is winding down. I read some quote somewhere - a twenty-something guy talking about consumerist behaviour, saying that ‘Motherhood is the dead end of culture’. That being a woman in her thirties, with a couple of kids instantly relegates you to the back closet of the world, to attract dust, and lameness, and mothballs for the next 60 years.

Well, I don’t give a toss if a 20-something gym bro doesn’t care for me anymore, but since when has that been the metric for being interesting and valuable to society? In other cultures, women - like men - gain status and respect as they age. They are valued for their contributions to society (you know, like that small, invisible, insignificant act of literally MAKING every member of that society with their guts and blood and brawn).

What’s my point? I don’t know. Am I just bitter? I don’t think so. I’m hovering around a feeling that is hard to put into words. I think I just really do not want to go gentle into that good night, and I am revolted by the thought that anyone, of any age, should be automatically slathered and slopped with the dank, dark, gluey brush that says ‘it’s over, you’re done’. Screw that. I’m not done til I’m dead!

When I think about youth and beauty - the kind of youth and beauty that you’ll have to rip from my ancient, bony hands - it is the same youth and beauty that Joanna Lumley still has, at 79. It’s Attenborough at 99. It’s my son, at 3 years old. It’s a vitality you keep in your bones; a love of the world and a dedication to chasing all that is wonderful in it.

And what do Attenborough, Lumley and my little boy all have in common?

They’re all gardeners. In fact, they are all gardeners with a specific love of things that are imperfect, beautiful and wild.

The longest-lived humans on this planet tend to be gardeners. They are compelled to keep moving. Their creaking bones and wizened hands are tools that don’t collect dust because they are too busy in the earth. They live in a perpetual state of hope, because there are always new seeds to be sown, new crops to be harvested, flowers to be picked. Yeah they’re still wrinkly (probably more than the people who spent their lives indoors), and yes - they’ll still die. But while they live, they glitter. I want to be exactly like them.

Grow a garden, make it wild and beautiful. Fall in love with it again and again, and you will never truly age, not where it counts. And your love and your passion, whether quiet or loud, will never be invisible.

So go on, it’s Sunday. Go potter. Catch and sing the sun in flight. And while you do, rage just a little bit (it’s fun).

P.S. Here is Joanna Lumley at the Chelsea garden show talking about her garden, and I just discovered Attenborough has a new series coming out next month called Secret Gardens, about the wild backyards of Britain.

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Our baby is 9 months old and, although she won’t let me break physical contact with her during any or all of her waking hours, she does seem to tolerate it between the hours of 8pm and 9pm at night (when she is unconscious), which means that, for a brief window of time, I have the ability to write with two hands, and to tell you all the things I think about gardening.

Hooray!!

So where are we?

One thing motherhood seems to be teaching me (again, and again, and again) is to trim the fat. To do only what actually matters, because there is so little available time to do anything. And increasingly, I am finding that only a few things ever actually matter. I heard people say - before having kids of my own - that having children forces you to become so much more decisive and efficient. They’re right. There’s no room for dithering and there’s no room for indulgent waffling. So waffle I shall no longer. Well, maybe a little bit.

This is true in the garden too. You can really let quite a lot fall apart before the bones of your design begin to disintegrate. And, when you get a minute to yourself, you can pull it all back together surprisingly fast with a few clever tactics that help give the illusion of order. One of these tactics is grey plants.

Grey (or silver) plants are an under-utilised design trick for creating an interesting garden that looks more thoughtful and ordered than it - perhaps - truly is. I am increasingly using them in my own garden because they do three things very effectively.

They pop

Their light, shimmery tones mean they jump out from the rest of the garden. This means if you dot them around, repeating them in each bed, they’ll help tie your garden together. (Aim for enough repetition that, wherever you’re standing, you can always see a few grey, floaty clouds of foliage).

They help outline the edges of other plants.

Because their foliage is so different from many of the plants we typically grow, grey and silver plants can help define the edges of the other plants in your garden. If you chuck a silver-grey wormwood next to a dark green box hedge, both plants will be easily distinguishable.

Being able to see the borders of plants make gardens look neater, but people usually achieve this the wrong way - by spacing plants so far about that they don’t touch. Sure, you can see the borders of the plants, but the garden looks empty. You want your plants to rub shoulders, but, you also want to be able to see where one plant ends and the other begins. Using grey/silver plants thoughtfully in your garden can help with this, because they usually look so different to their neighbours.

They contrast

Silver plants’ unusual, shimmering foliage offers opportunities for really beautiful colour contrasts. The one I am most excited about today is between a silver-grey curry plant (Helichrysum italicum) and a Coreopsis with apricot-pink blooms.

Silver just contrasts so well with so many other plants. My other favourite is to combine silvery-leafed plants with deep red or purple plants, like the deep, dark purple/red leaves of Canna Lily tropicana against my silvery Echium (I feel like it would also look great alongside some artichokes), and with plants that have bold, yellow blooms (wormwood next door to passionfruit marigolds - lovely!).

At this point Old Casey would probably decide to create a 20-item list of all the silvery plants you can grow, with side-notes and rants on barely-related topics. Not New Casey. New Casey needs to get to bed.

So I will say this - my favourite silvery plants to grow (reliable, Perth-friendly) are:

• Wormwood (Artemisia - several different varieties, all lovely)

• Curry plant (Helichrysum italicum)

• Old man saltbush

• Dusty miller (Jacobaea maritima)

• Artichokes (cardoons, if you can find them, are also super cool and related to artichokes)

• Echium

Andddd I want to say lambs ears and sage because they’re beautiful but I’ve killed every lambs ears I’ve ever bought and my sage plants are hanging on feebly for dear life and I have no idea why. Why can’t I grow sage?? Why??

Add some silver plants to your garden. That’s where it’s at.

See ya soon!

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