Red House and its garden were planned together to the extent that plant names were actually pencilled in to the drawings that the architect, Philip Webb, drew. These included white jasmine, roses, and passion flowers. Everything was done to protect the trees that had been in the orchard on which the House was built. Morris and Weeb shred the view that a house should be integrated with its surrounding landscape. Wendy Hitchmough has written, not extravagantly, that the 'house and its garden were inseparable ideologically, as a fusion of art and nature'. It is possible to think of the site of Red House as a number of rooms, some within the walls of the houseand some outside - with others (the two porches and the oriole window) being inside-outside. The current garden retains much of the spirt of the original garden and there are elements, such as the 'bowling green' on the west side that must be very similar. But the actual structure is a matter of much speculation and, since the house was bought by the National Trust, of research. Some of the garden has disappeared for development , some was added. The orchard on the west side was for a number of years (in the 1960s and 1970s) the possible site for further housing development.
What is known is that originally there was a formal garden at the front of the house (the north side) which was described by Lethaby as the 'the first of the modern square-plot and trained hedge type, which is now well known'. This was broken up into four smaller square gardens, each of which was surrounded by rose-covered wattle fences. It was based on medieval garden forms with a sequence of semi-open gardens each of which presented themselvef to the viewer. Elsewhere trees were widely spaced, arranged in parallel lines with straight gravel paths and long grass walks between flower beds bordered by lavender and rosemary. For many the garden represents the start of the Arts and Crafts garden movement which was to be exemplified in the work of Willaim Robonson and Gertrude Jekyll. Indeed Fiona Maccarthy has suggested that the garden was more genuinely influential than the house in its impact on the development of the Arts and Crafts trends of the later part of the 19th century.
