Here’s a gardening tip for you, courtesy of the experts here at Whingeing Pom: if you land in a house with a big backyard, full of blooming flowers and shrubs around an immaculate lawn, tasteful borders and, basically, everything you could want flora-wise, get a proper job and employ a gardener.

To us, that seems to be the obvious way forward. We’re cultured sorts with a love of the outdoors and, what with the weather here being just designed for sitting out on the decking with a chilled glass of Chardonnay, we can appreciate a beautiful garden as much as the next person.

But, to be honest, like swish hotel rooms, isn’t the joy of a perfect patch of land around your home that someone else keeps it looking that way? Can’t I just offer you the phone number of some talented, green-fingered type and stop here? We could just fill up the rest of pages with pictures of pretty flowers. That’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

I can see a lot of you nodding in agreement, but, hang on, there are some shocked faces in there too. Let someone else do the gardening? Sacrilege! OK, if you must, we’ll acknowledge that there are people out there that want to take the DIY approach to tending their patch and try our best to do this properly.

Actually, though, I suppose it’s quite obvious that gardening is a booming pastime around here. You only have to take in the carefully tended front yards of Perth’s sprawling suburbs to work that out. It’s rare that you’ll come across the old washing-machine strewn garden that’s so commonplace back home and surely not everyone’s taking the easy route and employing someone else to do the dirty work? So, yes, we’ll admit there must be a lot of you out there that actually enjoy getting up close and personal with a hoe.

But, while they’re admittedly beautiful, there’s something a bit odd about Perth’s gardens, and it isn’t until you’ve trundled around your millionth or so suburban street, with its immaculate lawns, clipped bushes and gently swaying rose bushes that you realise what’s bugging you. It’s spooky because, although you’re pretty sure you travelled for 24 hours away from Blighty, looking around you could be forgiven you merely sat in a plane which went nowhere further than the end of the runway.

Here you are, in the most remote, most decidedly hot and bothered capital city on Earth, and yet nearly every resident seems intent on replicating an episode of Midsomer Murders right here, on their front lawns. It’s as if they’ve all stepped off the plane with a pair of secateurs in their pocket, and a copy of ‘How to Garden The English Way’ in their hands.

Which is all a bit odd – presumably everybody who left the UK did so for very good reasons,  the weather, the stupid one-way systems, the repeats of Porridge on BBC2 – so why are so many so determined to create a facsimile of their lives, gardening-wise, now that they’ve made a new start here in Perth?

Is it just all about familiarity and a sort of dogged belief that if it grew in Portsmouth, it’ll grow in Perth, god damn it? Perfectly intelligent people, people who are employable and presumably responsible for quite important tasks seem unable to grasp that planting a shrub which is more at home swaying in the gentle West Country breeze will be fried to a crisp here in WA.

A few more experimental souls sometimes dabble in peculiar looking, foreign plants which, because they are usually sitting bang next to a collection of plants straight out of a Tewkesbury cottage garden then look as if a couple of aliens have taken root. The irony is, of course, that it’s the aliens which are at home, not the Tewkesbury interlopers. Perth has, and listen carefully please, would-be Alan Titchmarshes, Very Different Weather to England. There really is no reason at all that a climate which bakes ground to a dusty rock for nearly six months of the year, then drenches it and threatens to blow it into the Indian Ocean for the rest of the year should happily accommodate a nice little collection of tea roses and bluebells.

Some people are so set on recreating their dream UK garden that they plant little vegetable plots, like southern hemisphere allotments, perhaps longing for the camaraderie left back home of a mittened mug of Heinz tomato soup in the shed, contemplating whether this year’s crop of Maris Pipers will be up to scratch. Only over here, a month or so into the planting season, everything will have been consumed by barely recognisable bugs or the terrifying-sounding nematodes, or become parched to the point of a husk, or drowned and washed away down towards the nearest drains. And forget Heinz tomato soup – you can’t get it out here. Just that Campbell’s condensed rubbish.

Of course, it’s not as if Perth’s own indigenous plantlife is anything short of spectacular. You just need to take an amble around Kings Park’s Botanical Gardens to draw inspiration for a garden which really works out here. Sure, we’re not all going to have the space for those majestic gum trees which line the avenue into the park, but surely one of the 8000 or so native wildflowers which grow there – and nowhere else in the world – would be a good starting point for a domestic planting plan?

And Kings Park is very good at telling its residents exactly what this and that are – chances are there will be a little plaque next to the plant you’re interested in, explaining exactly what genus and species it is so you can rush off to Bunnings and buy some for yourself. In fact, they are so keen to help at the park that there is a bank of Master Gardeners, just waiting for your call, doling out advice to help domestic gardeners eschew the pansy and try something new and, most importantly, native. Just call 9480 3672, leave a message about your particular planting dilemma, and an expert will call you back.

There are plant sales too at the park, where you get to fondle some true gems, and take them home with you, as well as the chance to discuss with the Friends of the Park your problems – of the gardening variety, of course. Although they would probably be equally happy to discuss the parlous state of Perth’s TV schedules too, if it’s a slow day.

Oh, and by the way, if you’re stuck out in the northern suburbs, as most of us ex-pats tend to be, and don’t fancy the long trawl up the Mitchell Freeway to Kings Park, there is cheap and easy horticultural advice on your doorstep, wherever you live. It comes courtesy of the aforementioned Bunnings, a DIY and gardens chain that is so successful in Australia that we can guarantee there’ll be one within spitting distance of wherever you set up home.

Bunnings sets up its stall in sprawling warehouse stores on the many retail parks in Perth. They’re all massive – if you think you’ve got lost in Homebase back home then you’ve got a shock coming. Each one has an outdoor area packed with pots, plants, fertiliser, seeds, tools – everything you could need really. And what’s more they all offer training courses for the enthusiastic amateur. Check out your store’s foyer and you’ll find a list of them, bitesize sessions explaining everything from lawn maintenance to the art of the bonsai. They even do kids ones too, so you can put your brood to work for you.

But, anyway, back to the gardens of Perth. When you think about it, it is deeply ironic that so many gardeners rely on the British way of doing things here in WA. Ironic because the state accounts for half of the entire continent’s 25,000 plant species – more than any other state in the country – and they are so unique that many occur nowhere else on earth. So it’s not as if you could claim a lack of inspiration as your excuse for falling back on lavender and petunias as the way to fill your borders.

The main thing, according to The Garden Gurus – Neville Passmore and Trevor Cochrane on Channel 9 – is to accept that plants here in WA need to be the kind which don’t need a lot of water – or if they do need water, you need to work out a way of trapping as much as you can. Waterwise is a key term which comes up time and time again as they direct the nation’s gardeners to backyard heaven. And it must work – Neville has an 800sqm suburban garden filled with 60 fruiting plants as well as some thriving veggies.

Plants are all very well but what about the lawn? Nothing shows a homeowner’s deep commitment to the pursuit of unhappiness and stress than an unholy glowing emerald lawn. How the hell has that been achieved in this country of parched, red earth? The answer is reticulation. A word which, until you arrive here, hot and bothered off the plane, you probably only had a nodding acquaintance with. But in the days that follow, as you get to grips with the fact that your house only has one plug socket in each room and there’s no way of changing the oven light without breaking the bulb, you will doubtless be introduced to the joys of reticulation.

For the uninitiated, retic – for that is how the natives refer to this bastion of Aussie horticulture – is an automatic watering system which comes as standard in just about all homes built here. Labyrinthine pipes deliver precious H20 to strategic points around the garden on the command of a complicated control panel which, for the technologically-unsavvy, can seem immensely hard to programme. But master it you must as, because of the general scarcity of water in WA, reticking at the wrong time is a sin deeply frowned up. An ingenious system based on your house number allocates you a day when you’re allowed to water – government-bought adverts on the radio remind you when it’s your turn – and pity the poor sod who gets it wrong. The powers that be will come down hard with fines and don’t for one second think you’ll get away with it. You will be grassed up (literally) by your neighbours – they’re more likely to turn a blind eye to you horsewhipping your six-year-old on the front lawn than watering it on the wrong day.

But thanks to this mechanical watering system, most people are rewarded with a green lawn, with minimum effort. Unless, of course, your retic system is a bit half-arsed, and only sprays half the lawn, leaving the rest as dry as a bone, and covered in insanely uncomfortable prickly things which get in between your toes whether you’re wearing flip flops or not.

Once you’re on top of the planting and grass surrounding your homes, many people’s thoughts turn fowl. Yes, there’s a growing trend among Perth’s gardening elite to pepper their backyards with peckers of the chicken variety. It was the sort of thing, back home, which hessian-wearing country-lovers stuck in the city would do, buying groovy pod-like chicken coups for their Silkies to roost in, boasting at the office that they collected two freshly lain eggs for their breakfast that morning.

Now Perth, as ever, several years behind the rest of the world’s ideas and innovations, has grasped the chicken-keeping concept whole-heartedly, and most of the popular gardening shows have run features on how to keep birds in your back garden.

The benefits are life-affirming if all goes well – how wonderful to collect a warm basketful of eggs in the morning to have with your cup of tea. On the other hand, how deeply distressing to discover your chickens have flown the coup in the night, or worse, been mangled to a feathery mess by some hungry predator. Chickens can, rather surprisingly, fly, and many a would-be Good Life imitator have been surprised and alarmed to find their chooks happily roosting away next to the galahs in the nearest gum tree. The key, of course, is to build them a home which they will be happy to stay in, and to make it safe from encroaching beasts. Follow Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall’s advice on this one and stick your chicken houses on stilts.

There you have it then. For those of you intent on ignoring our sage advice to employ someone else to tend your plot, our Plan B is to embrace the new world when you trade the brown dirt of home for the red of down under. By all means recreate a tiny piece of Leamington Spa on the other side of your backdoor, but mix and match it with the fruits of your new homeland. There are countless benefits – the beauty of new and exotic flowers, the surreal twists of Australian trees, but there’s also the clincher that you can grow lemons and limes here so you’ll always have a slice to put in your G&T when you finally take off your gardening gloves.