Gardening with Casey Joy, Perth, Western, Perth (2026)

05/06/2026

I’m all for nice footpaths, but if we actually want people to USE the footpaths, we should probably plant a few more trees around them.

Let’s face it, Perth’s canopy crisis is ridiculous (and I’ve heard alarmingly similar stories from other states, even from other countries).

If we don’t learn how to live with trees, if we don’t collectively begin to actually value them enough to spend money on planting and protecting them, then no one is going to be going outside in ten years anyway.

Walking on hot pavement in the Australian sun, with no greenery overhead, is, well, not a walk in the PARK now is it 😂 harharharrrr it’s funny but it’s not.

Let your local council know if you’re proud of their work. And more importantly, let them know if you’re not.

While you’re at it, take some of that indignant rage and PLANT A TREE YOURSELF! Eighty percent of the tree loss in Perth is coming from private land.

Check out local legends .wa and to name just a few, and get a tree in your garden this winter!

26/05/2026

A good garden needs exciting plants that are well suited to Perth’s climate, and these are my favourite places to buy them!

👉🏻 if you’d want my full list, plus seed and bulbs websites, tree stockists, soil suppliers etc etc, comment BLACKBOOK and I’ll send you my free guide to my favourite places to shop

Now, here are the nurseries - highly recommend you check them all out if you haven’t already! Such lovely folk doing such good stuff! ❤️

1. - Guildford
2. .wa - Freo
3. - South Freo (near fav wine bar .bar hehe)
4. - north Freo
5. Xanthorrea (check out their website for details!) - maida vale

26/05/2026

I have two solutions for you!

If you found these ideas useful, you’re probably like me. A big, blank piece of paper stresses me out, and holy s**t there is just no chance I am ever going to make a scaled drawing of my backyard and fill it with perfectly measured out circles to represent the trees I may or may not plant.

We FEEL like this is how we’re SUPPOSED to design our gardens because it’s what all garden designers and garden design courses seem to do.

Well, if you need permission to ditch that expectation, here it is. Because I have never once done a scaled drawing of my garden.

The methods I recommend in this post are exactly what I do every time I reimagine my garden, and they are just the very beginning of the methods I share in my garden design course.

This course is made for people like me - who feel more creative and happier when allowed to experiment, and who don’t necessarily have a tonne of money or time to dedicate to their garden in one huge chunk.

The course is self paced, so you can chip away at it even with kids or a busy job. Rather than giving you a fiddly method for garden design, I cover all the overarching principles that I’ve used when designing my garden (the law of enclosure, creating living zones, placing passages through the garden, highlighting focal points).

Because they aren’t tied to a piece of paper, these can be applied continually throughout your years in your garden, meaning it can evolve with you and your family, and it doesn’t have to be scary - it can actually be FUN.

My garden design course takes you from a blank slate to a fully fleshed garden, with tree recommendations, paths, living areas, plant styling tactics, hardscaping suggestions and more.

It is $197 and will be $197 until spring, when prices will increase a little. If you’re thinking about making your garden more beautiful this winter, it is a great investment (an hour with a garden designer is usually upwards of $200).

Comment DESIGN for the full info on the course.

And if you just want to dip your toe in, comment BLANKSLATE for my quick guide to starting from nothing - an easy and practical primer garden design course, and a great way to start

26/05/2026

The idea that we all deserve to live in beautiful places is something talks about a lot. And it’s true. But somehow we’ve been convinced to think of beauty as this superfluous, inessential thing.

Like it’s only for the uber rich, and that everyone else should just suck it up.

It’s just so convenient for the people developing new build suburbs that everyone in Perth has become terrified of trees. Because trees actually are a nuisance if what you want is to stamp cookie-cutter houses with no backyards onto a bare patch of sand and rubble.

In some bizarre dystopian turn of events, trees have turned into the boogeyman, and it’s just so HANDY because it means no one is talking about how all these treeless suburbs are contravening the basic human right to live amongst the natural world that we were, until recently, a part of.

It just doesn’t feel good to be in a place with no trees or plants. It doesn’t. It’s depressing and stark and weird and the scary thing is people are forgetting that. They’re acclimating to the weirdness, and not realising that’s the reason they feel like crap.

Our planet is the only known place in the UNIVERSE fortunate enough to harbour trees.

And you deserve one in your backyard.
And your pipes will be fine.

24/05/2026

Am I the only one who finds tree roots very beautiful?!

The truth is there are so many trees that have perfectly polite root systems, but look around your parks and notice the ones that don’t. The ones with snaking, gnarled roots. They are beautiful!

And every time I see a kid near one of them they are INSTANTLY doing one thing - trying to balance on the roots.

We shuttle our kids off to playgrounds and trampoline warehouses (admittedly that’s fun), but we so often disregard just how valuable it is to do the simple things - how much more mentally stimulating it is to play in, or on, or up a tree, because no two trees are the same, so you have to actually THINK.

I’m not saying it has to be one or the other, all roots or all pavement, but i am saying that tree roots aren’t a singularly bad thing.

In fact, they are beautiful, and, if you wanna avoid stacking it in the supermarket when you’re 85, maybe even essential.

Plant some trees!!

And if you want tips on where to find good trees, comment BLACKBOOK for my free guide to all my favourite nurseries in Perth and online!

22/05/2026

I have one more tip that is even more important👇🏻

Start a new habit - LOOK around Perth to see what plants are thriving.

Before you drive to the garden centre, drive around a few of the leafy suburbs. Try Nedlands, Mt Lawley, West Leederville, Peppermint Grove (basically all the suburbs where the wealthy developers who make new builds devoid of trees live 😉😂).

You will see a lot of TREES growing CLOSE to HOUSES!! And you’ll realise trees aren’t so scary. You’ll also see beautiful plant combinations and get inspired, and you’ll see plants that consistently feature and do well here.

This might be my single biggest tip actually, probably should’ve put it in the actual post itself 😆 I make a point now of paying attention to plants that are already growing and thriving outside of the plant nurseries they came from, because that means they are likely to succeed in my garden.

(I use the free app called PictureThis to ID plants I don’t recognise).

If you want a list of my most reliable plants that can be grown easily, transplanted easily and generally do well in Perth, I have also just released a guide on exactly that. The Perth Plant Palette contains 36 of my favourite trees, shrubs, climbers, bulbs, edibles and flowers to grow in my garden.

These are the plants that make up my 80% and mean that I don’t ever feel like I’m failing toooo hard at gardening.

Comment PALETTE if you’d like to check it out, and comment SOIL if you’d like to grab my soil guide at the same time.

Gardening can be easy and satisfying. Just get your soil happy, plant some TREES and stop buying hydrangeas!!

20/05/2026

So many factors make Perth a challenging place to garden, but soil is one that you can fix right now, and it will fundamentally change the way you garden.

Whether you’re starting with sandy grey soil like I was, or if you’ve been given a delightful patch of builders rubble, you can fix your soil fairly quickly and fairly simply.

Check out for a great native soil mix (among many other soil products), for clay look at , for mulch and manure check out . For a big load of soil, look at the mixes from .

You can also add sheep manure, you can barter with your friend in the hills for a bit of their clay soil, you can dig deep holes and chuck in all your veggie scraps, you can collect autumn leaf litter right now.

Make your focus this autumn bulking out Perth’s dry sand with organic matter and fine particles. Do it as much as possible, WAY more than you think. Let the winter rain water it in, and you’ll be in a FAR better position next summer.

And if you want more help fixing your soil, comment SOIL and I’ll send you the link to grab my Perth-specific guide, where I outline how I fixed my sandy soil (you also get a 12-minute walkthrough video demo so you can see how I work these amendments into my own garden beds).

Soil is the easiest and most immediate thing within every Perth gardener’s power to fix, but it’s also the most overlooked. Get your soil tip top and I promise your garden will be vastly more beautiful, resilient and fun to grow in!

15/05/2026

There’s a piece of advice for healthy eating that says nutrition doesn’t have to be complicated, just make sure to eat foods your grandma would have recognised as food.

The same can be said for gardening products.

Would my nanna, who gardened her who life, through a world war, have wanted or needed a soil meter? Nope.

All the great gardeners I meet have very few gadgets. Gardening isn’t actually that complicated. You basically have to pour a tonne of energy and a healthy chunk of money into having really good soil, make sure your plants get water, and then you can pretty much grow whatever you like. Truly!

But instead we get distracted and turned around because every man and his dog is on here being an influencer-ambassador for some new hose or chainsaw or bug spray and so you think ‘if they say I need it, maybe I do’. And then you get the thing and it does bum-diddly apart from wasting a bit of your time and money, and sometimes actively making your problems worse (looking at you pesticides and soil wetters).

I get messages on here from time to time asking if I’d like to promote garden stuff. Sometimes the stuff is kinda cool or pretty, but it’s still just stuff. Stuff that you probably don’t need, so I say no.

Instead of filling your shopping trolley with gardening gadgets, just buy a whole lot of animal manure. I promise it’s the best s**t you’ll ever buy, and it’ll do more than a soil meter ever could.

And if you want help fixing your soil, comment SOIL and I’ll dm you the link to check out the soil guide I wrote specifically for Perth gardeners with very sandy soil that repels water (it doesn’t need soil wetters or liquid feeds or rock dust and it doesn’t need any of the other stuff on the soil shelves at Bunnings!).

Over 400 gardeners have already used it in their gardens, and yes, I’m biased, but I think it’s a helluva lot more useful than a soil meter (and about the same price!) 😆

👉🏻 comment SOIL to check it out!

11/05/2026

Am I being too pie in the sky about this? Probably. But…

Imagine if more people valued trees. If less people were unnecessarily scared of them, or predisposed to be negative towards them.

Not only would it mean your neighbours might not make a fuss if you plant a tree that grows big and overhangs their backyard, it would also mean there are more people who are insulted and enraged by what a handful of developers are doing to our city, our environment, our planet.

So many Perth gardeners are starting on the back foot, and it’s not fair, but public opinion has changed on many issues in the past, and the change has had a real and lasting impact on politics.

I think it’s time for public option to change about trees!

And one small way we can ALL help with that this winter, is by planting one ourselves.

If you’re planting a tree this autumn/winter, post what it is in the comments!

09/05/2026

Most of the time your garden struggles it boils down to one of two things:

1. Your soil is no good (so common in Perth, comment SOIL if you’d like my guide to restoring your soil)

2. You’re just growing plants that don’t really like it here!

There are so many beautiful local native plants you can grow that have evolved to want to grow here. And if - like me - you ALSO like exotics, there are tonne of those too.

So many, in fact, that to make it simple for you to get started I have taken the most reliable 36 trees, shrubs, edibles, bulbs, flowering annuals and climbers, and turned them into a Plant Palette (like a capsule wardrobe for your garden!).

If you want to start your garden on the right foot, and you’d like plants that are interesting and beautiful as well as being tough, AND if you’ve had enough of hothoused plants from Bunnings dying on you the second you plant them, grab a copy of my guide and add these plants to your patch.

120 pages of growing recommendations, plant pairings, design suggestions and 6 ‘recipes’ for combining the plants to suit different aesthetics, I’ve loved making this book and I hope you love it too!

👉🏻 comment PALETTE if you want to check it out ☺️

Gardening with Casey Joy

05/06/2026

26/05/2026

26/05/2026

26/05/2026

24/05/2026

22/05/2026

20/05/2026

15/05/2026

11/05/2026

09/05/2026

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