Kitchen Garden Walls Immediately North East Of Wood House

These kitchen garden walls date from 1899 to 1905 and were designed by Thomas Mawson. They are constructed of carefully selected granite rubble, designed to resemble crazy paving, with granite ashlar dressings, slate coping, slate and brick dressings, and a slate roof to the service rooms and glass roofs to the greenhouses.

The kitchen garden is laid out across a gentle slope facing northeast, with a range of service buildings at the northwest end, including a men's shed, tool shed, mushroom and forcing shed, seed store, fruit room, and a two-story boiler room and potting shed. These buildings are of granite with brick dressings, featuring timber casements with glazing bars and plain carpentry and joinery detail. A series of glass-roofed structures, including a peat house, vinery, palm house, plant houses, and cold frames, stand in front of these service buildings. These are mainly iron-framed with glass, mostly on granite footings but some on brick, now disused.

The most significant feature is the watering well or fountain in the north corner. Behind this, the outer wall is higher than the rest, with ashlar coping and a series of small corbels. In front of the fountain, a semi-circular retaining wall encloses the watering reservoir, which was fed through a fountain in a blocked round-headed alcove defined by up-ended slates set at alternating angles. The keystone of this alcove originally featured a bronze lion's head tap. A doorway to the right has a round head and ovolo-moulded surround, with the original door remaining. To the left, running parallel with the house, the wall has flat-topped granite coping, some of which has collapsed. Beyond the house, where another doorway leads to the main formal garden, the walling returns to slate coping.

The kitchen garden was designed to generate income rather than simply provide for the household and is part of a wider landscaping scheme created by Mawson to accompany the rebuilding of Wood House. Mawson considered the entire scheme to be one of his major achievements.