Want an easy garden? Plant a tree.

If you want a garden that is easy to look after, just plant one carefully chosen tree. You could let the leaves fall and rot into the ground - no sweeping or feeding necessary.
It would provide shade and cooling effects - with sunshine from the north in winter if you plant a deciduous tree.

Macadamia nuts (Aus Mac site).

Citrus trees are good, not really prone to fruit-fly, too much. Or a nut tree - macadamia or almond - so you can accidentally feed some black cockatoo in a few years time.

There are a number of small Eucalypts and Hakeas that can fit in well in a garden. A few grasses and small shrubs can make a good little garden to provide habitat for local small birds.
Eucalyptus caesia is not a big tree, Euc forrestiana is another good one. Hakea bucculenta and Hakea laurina are also beautiful small flowering trees. Australian flowering trees are an important part of birds needs so a garden gets lots of visitors when they are flowering. The birds also provide pest control for any fruit and veg that are growing nearby.

Passionfruit's new home and lemon grass garden edge.

Our passionfruit is looking marvellous at the moment, one of the happiest things in the garden (we do spoilt it a bit). The other night my feller went across the road and reclaimed an old metal ladder from a skip bin. It is now holding up our lovely passionfruit vine, which we now notice has quite a few fruit forming. Tidying and rearranging that is also making way for a large pot of lemongrass to become an extension of the row of lemongrass in the ground, that will make a new layer of garden in front of the biochar garden patch. Slowly the edible garden extends north.

After one bit of rain the other day and temperatures finally falling below 30 C (just under halfway through autumn) Perth gardeners are starting to think it's okay to plant food plants again. Poor old Perthites, we miss the rain. It can be such a long time between visits.