Wood House, registered park or garden in West Devon

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What is recorded here

Wood House developed from a Devon farm into an early twentieth-century house and garden scheme. Thomas Mawson advised on changes that were largely complete within five years of his first consultation.

History

Wood had been a substantial farm, centred on a house dating from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. An orchard and kitchen garden occupied land south and south-west of it. In 1900 the barrister William Lethbridge asked Thomas Mawson to plan changes to the property. Most work on the house and new gardens was finished by 1905.

In the grounds

The formal garden and surrounding parkland occupy about 13 hectares. Mawson designed and landscaped the early twentieth-century scheme, but the older orchard and kitchen garden show that productive planting had preceded it. The new design developed around an existing farm house rather than a newly established site, giving the garden an older agricultural layer beneath its formal appearance.