The Charles House Garden was conceived as a gardener’s garden, providing an enclosed place for active engagement and harvest, sharing outdoor meals, recreation and play. It forms an environment that combines a bush garden street frontage which merges into an eclectic suburban wilderness and productive garden to the rear of the house. A combination of native and indigenous plants mixes with productive and ornamental species, playing different roles in offering biodiversity, shade, enclosure, seasonal interest and ingredients for cooking.

The garden continues along the northern aspect of the house providing a verdant and evolving outlook and incorporating the different requirements of use including areas for dining outdoors, a soccer pitch, play equipment, vegetable & herb gardens and fishponds. The front yard features primarily local indigenous plants, including the planting of an established indigenous tree – a large, multi-trunked, Eucalyptus leucoxylon sub species connata - a heavily flowering gum species, that forms an instant threshold to the two-storey home and defining a boundary to the street, in lieu of a front fence. The front garden is frequented by local insects and birds and introducing a presence of the pre-European settlement landscape to the suburban street’s character.

Featuring plant species endemic to the site, the terrain of the front garden has been formed and stabilised through extensive rock and indigenous vegetation including local flowering grasses and wildflowers. The reshaped terrain to the northern boundary elevates the vegetation to form external continuous enclosure and privacy.