Twenty-one fruit, nut and spice trees create an edible forest on this inner-city block. From early September when the stone-fruit trees burst into a spray of small white flowers and the next-door neighbour’s bee colony leaps into action, the edible garden is busy. By mid-December, the blood plums are ripening with the apricots not far behind. Rainbow lorikeets and gorgeous finches are frequent visitors, adding song and chatter to the yard. With the plum tree alone producing between 20 and 40 kilograms of fruit each year, there’s plenty to share with the local wildlife. The garden’s very own solitary fruit bat, Cyril, can be seen in the warm evenings swooshing from figs to apricots. Breakfast on Christmas Day is complemented by bowls of divine mulberries, and then through the summer months, pomegranates are sprinkled over salads or added to cocktails. Pears are baked and served with ice cream. In Autumn, the persimmon tree is awash with orange baubles, pecan nuts are falling and the oranges and apples are ready for eating. All’s quiet in winter, with only the lemons braving the weather.

The pear trees stretch down the northern side of the house, messily pleached and hugged at their base by ginger and cardamon, and complemented on the opposite side of the path by a long unhindered bed of mint. It’s a slice of aromatic pleasure and, in spring, the breeze wafts the most delicious scent of blooming white pear flowers through the house. The walk starts with a Josephine and then wends from a Beurre Bosc and a Packham’s Triumph, to a Howell’s Howell and a William’s. It ends with a vaguely cylindrical Bay tree stretching up beyond the roof of the house – Martha’s home, the garden’s petite ring-tailed possum.

A band of Buffalo shade-tolerant lawn is bordered by defined garden beds – on one side, in the shadow of neighbouring townboxes, is a fernery and on the other a formal rectangle of hedged Dutch box and three tall misshapen English box topiary balls. This is the Somewhat White Garden, but really the White-and-Orange Garden – designed to be luminescent at twilight from the back deck of the house. All the plants in this area have either white or orange flowers and the fruit – persimmons, pomegranates, loquats, blood oranges and Washington navels – are all orange in colour. In spring, the formal hedged bed bursts with white hyacinths and freesias, while white daisies flower consistently. Eventually, when fully grown, the garden will end in a hedge of blood oranges and Washington navels that hide an entrance to the Secret Garden beyond, and enclose a wooden post from which the clothesline is drawn.

Nestled behind the outdoor dunny and the conservatory is a wee kitchen garden. In three raised beds made from Redgum railway sleepers, a no-dig garden of manure, straw, compost and garden soil is home to a small collection of vegetables in spring and summer. This year, Rainbow Chard and tomatoes are augmented with three broccoli plants and a smattering of beetroots.

To the side of the kitchen garden is a tiny succulent garden – Agave, Aeoniums and Aloe Vera – peeping through pebbles, and a Jasmine plant reaching upwards to a lattice still a little out of its reach.

An enclosed space dominated by a grand, elderly Apricot tree, which nestles the chook house in its branches. The yard is flanked by a no-dig boxed bed filled with Jerusalem Artichokes, dormant and edible in winter, but growing like bright sunflowers against the shed wall in spring and summer. Geraniums and Chile Guava add colour to the front of the yard, while zucchini leaves are lily pads the chooks can dart under in their quest for bugs. A wormwood shrub is medicinal, but also adds a smokey, sage green to the garden’s palette.

At the very back of the property, designed to be eventually hidden from the house behind a hedge of orange trees is the Secret Garden. A lush, private space: the perfect nook to relax or read a book. The centrepiece of the garden is a giant lawn-and-marble chessboard with 60cm-high Chess pieces. It’s shaded by a majestic Pecan tree that can be seen for hundreds of metres beyond the property. To the east side of the lawn is a bed of bulbs, most larger than a fist in size, and collected from throughout the property where they had been planted over 50 years by the previous owner, Caterina Morgana. Now, all in one space, this beautiful collection of bulbs is named Caterina’s Corner in her honour.