Situated next to the marble dairy featured in a previous post is the Head Gardener’s House.

Beside the dairy is the ornate Scottish seventeenth-century style Head-Gardener’s House of 1897, directly inspired by Argyll’s Lodging in Stirling, and surrounded by its neat garden behind a fine wrought-iron gate. The high status of the head-gardener in the estate hierarchy is obvious from such a residence, including even a decorative dolphin fountain and sundial.

On the south side of the house, Kinross designed four formal garden terraces still planted in Edwardian style. A geometric terrace is now stocked with floribunda roses and hostas, To one side is a small grass terrace, edged by four large stone vases. Below it, through a wrought-iron gate with griffins adorning the piers, is a tennis lawn, and below that, a croquet lawn. There is a stone dovecote on the far side of the elevated terrace provided for.

The lower terraces are surrounded by a bank of rhododendrons down to the lake, smoothly achieving the transition from nineteenth-century formal gardens to eighteenth-century picturesque landscape.*

The lower terrace and the lake can be viewed in my previous post.

*From the Manderston guidebook

The Home of Lord Palmer, Manderston is the Edwardian House par excellence. It was built with no expense spared and with every modern convenience of that  era. Here you can see sumptuous staterooms and a silver staircase, the only one in the world. Coupled with the elaborate domestic quarters, it gives an intriguing insight into the daily life of the Edwardian Country House.

Outside there a princely stables, octagonal marble dairy and fifty six acres of garden immaculately kept to enjoy.*

*From a leaflet advertising the house