Gardening with Casey Joy

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Gardening with Casey Joy

Helping people grow beautiful, natural & edible gardens with ease, joy and excitement; one step at a time.

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Vegan and vegetarian meals improvised out of my garden! ...And cake :)

27/10/2026

I really can’t stand it when people take themselves too seriously in the garden.

I’ve been ‘reprimanded’ on here in the past for not using plants’ Latin names, I’ve been called anti-intellectual! I promise I’m not, I just know that it’s these sorts of attitudes that are stopping untold numbers of people from starting their gardens, because it makes gardening sound like such ✨SERIOUS BUSINESS✨

It’s the same reason I get annoyed by people who are puritanical about growing only native plants. Yes, it is good to understand your plants, it’s cool to know what plant family they come from, which plants they’re related to, how to identify them, it’s great to plant things that support local wildlife, and native plants are great for that too.

The thing is, all of that comes naturally to most gardeners with time. The longer you garden, the more plants you find yourself recognising. The more plants you grow, the more confidence you get to add new, interesting and possibly fussier plants.

But none of that happens if you get intimidated out of starting in the first place!! None of that happens if other people make gardening seem high-pressure, overly complicated or like there are a million things you might get WRONG!

Gardening is easy. You need good soil for whatever you’re growing (if you want help with that, comment SOIL to grab my guide to fixing Perth soil), you need sunshine and water and you need plants that are tough and robust so you can cut your teeth on a garden that isn’t so precious and delicate that it’ll die in our first summer (comment PALETTE for my guide to 36 plants that are tough and grow easily in Perth).

You also need to be ok with killing plants and with learning as you go.

I really think everyone who truly loves gardening (and who isn’t lumbered by a massive ego) will say the same, because even really great gardeners kill their plants, even experienced gardeners see plants they can’t identify (that’s part of the fun!).

If you need permission to garden imperfectly, you’ve found the right account, because everything I do is imperfect, and I routinely forget the names of a heap of plants growing in my

26/10/2026

The reason most gardens fail is because…they never get started!

Really - the biggest, worst thing you can do is put off making a decision about where to stick your first plants.

There are a MILLION ways to grow a garden, there are endless styles, a million layouts. Anything you create will likely have its good points and its bad points.

Trying to arrive at the perfect plan before you get going is impossible - there are too many factors at play and your garden will change as it matures anyway. The best thing you can do is not get too caught up in fretting over the details and just b**g something in the ground!

What makes a garden beautiful isn’t some really hyper-detailed plan, I think it boils down to these three things:

1. There are a LOT of plants and not much empty space
2. The plants are healthy (for this you might need to improve your soil - comment SOIL if you want to grab my soil improvement guide for Perth gardeners)
3. The plants are mature - this is a big one. Plants get more beautiful as they age! Older gardens tend to be more beautiful simply because they’re older! The trees grow, the perennial shrubs get bigger and take up more space, the whole garden just fills out. AND you as the gardener learn more, experiment more, and get better at knowing what works and what doesn’t, what you like and what you don’t like.

That last reason is the reason you shouldn’t wait for the perfect plan. Because you can be as perfectionistic as you like, but one of the most important ingredients in your garden is something you can’t plan your way to, and something you can’t conjure out of thin air: time.

Many gardens just need a bit of time to really look wonderful. And the best way to give your garden more time is to… START IT TODAY!!

P.S. if you wanna start your garden today and your soil is already happy, comment PALETTE to grab my guide to 36 of the best trees, climbers, edibles, bulbs, flowers and shrubs to grow in Perth (they survive our summers, they tolerate heat, and they are beautiful too!)

25/10/2026

Does your soil look like this? Good! Let’s fix it!

If you think you’re a crappy gardener because your plants all die, barely produce flowers/fruits or always get attacked by bugs (and you live in Perth, Western Australia), there is a GOOD chance you’re actually a fine gardener and it’s just your soil screwing you over!

Perth soil is incredibly sandy and dry and if you can’t work out why gardening always feels like an uphill battle, the answer is almost certainly your soil.

Gardening here is a TOTALLY different ballgame compared to gardening anywhere else. But don’t let that deter you. In fact, it’s a good thing. Because soil can be fixed, and it’s easier and quicker than you might think.

I fixed the soil in my Perth garden, and now I have earthworms, happier plants and no cataclysmic mass plant deaths over summer.

So I wrote a guide to help you do the same!

Inside my ebook Sand to Soil, I show you exactly how I improve sandy, dry and lifeless Perth soil step-by-step, including:

🪱 What soil amendments I add
🪱 How much I add
🪱 How I apply them
🪱 How this turns sand into moisture-holding, nutrient-rich, worm-filled soil.

It’s written specifically for sandy Perth gardens (because our soil is uniquely challenging and needs Perth-specific solutions; most books and online resources are written for gardeners with soil that isn’t quite as much of a ✨barren desert ✨as ours).

Over 400 Perth gardeners have already used it to transform their soil 🌱

Everyone who buys my guide will also receive a 12-minute video walkthrough showing you exactly how I improve one of my garden beds, so you can copy the exact process in your own garden ☺️

Comment SOIL and I’ll dm you the link 🌻🌷

25/10/2026

Ok there are so many but here are five more!

These are all plants that I find tough, reliable and beautiful:

1. Passionfruit marigolds (tagetes lemmonii) - covered in bright orange flowers throughout the year, such a great shrub for a cottage garden!

2. Banksias - so good for our local birds and there are so many beautiful varieties to choose from, whether you want a 1.5m structural shrub or a big, rugged tree

3. Chinese ground orchids - google these! A super beautiful little bulb that I don’t see around Perth much but you can order it online and it does well in pots and comes up year after year

4. Miscanthus silver feather grass - a LOVELY grass with golden ‘flowers’ in late summer, really good for adding a windswept, dynamic feel to your garden

5. Aeoniums - look for the ones with the dark purple leaves they are so striking and SO tough, and they look strangely beautiful paired with floaty plants like cosmos or gauras (butterfly bush). Super cool combo!

For a bigger curated list of tough plants I LOVE (plus how to combine them for a beautiful Perth garden), comment PALETTE and check out my guide The Perth Plant Palette - 36 trees, climbers, edibles, flowers and bulbs that I find so very well here, propagate easily and make gardening much more rewarding.

And if you want to know WHERE to find all these great plants, comment BLACKBOOK for my free (!) guide to all the places I love to shop in Perth and online ❤️🌻

25/10/2026

Here’s the lesson: if one plant is thriving in your garden, and you have other similar plants that are struggling, dig up ALL the struggling ones and shove them in right next to the one that’s happy.

I guess the actual meta lesson here is that 9 times out of 10 it is the ENVIRONMENT a plant is in that determines whether it grows well or fails.

And we can beat our heads against the wall trying to coddle the struggling plants into being happy where they are, but it is sooo much better and lazier to just stick them in the environment they really want.

We often mistakenly view our gardens as single spaces, and try to buy a palette of plants to spread consistently through the whole space. But most gardens are made up of a bunch of microclimates. Under a shady tree is a totally different ballgame to in a sunny, dry corner. So you need different plants for each spot.

Instead of trying to make your garden fit the plants, move the plants to a spot they naturally like, and focus on buying plants that are predisposed to like your garden.

It makes gardening SO much more fun when you can direct your energy to things other than just desperately trying to keep your plants alive 😅

For a curated list of 36 plants that do really well in Perth, across a bunch of conditions, plus recipes for how to combine them to suite different gardening styles, comment PALETTE and l’ll send you the link to check out my Perth Plant Palette - a guide to my favourite things to grow in my garden for beauty and resilience. It’s like a capsule wardrobe for your garden!

And pay attention to what’s working in your garden - which plants are happy and which aren’t? Then just do MORE of what’s working (it’s honestly all I do, it’s lazy and it works! 😄).

Address

Perth, Western
Perth, WA

Website

http://caseyjoylister.com/

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