Kingston Maurward is an agricultural and horticultural college set within a listed parkland setting. The recently constructed new Learning Resources Centre sits between two Grade 1 listed manors. Consultation with interested stakeholders, including English Heritage, was undertaken to ensure a solution sensitive to the historic setting was achieved. The need for development provided the impetus for replanting a significant area of the parkland setting of the house which had been lost over the last century. Subtle ground modelling was designed to form a unifying device to bed the building into the ground and to conceal, without the need for mass screen planting, the indispensable car parking, from principal views over the parkland. The proposal included the removal of visually intrusive, and historically incorrect woodland block planting carried out in the 1970s to open up views across parkland as well as creating a visual link between the two manor houses. A tree layout from the 1800s superimposed onto the development plan guided the layout of the tree planting proposals and reference to archive watercolours stored at the local Dorchester Museum, as well as literary sources (Kingston Maurward (AKA Knapwater House) was used as the setting for Thomas Hardy's first published novel - Desperate Remedies) gave clues to the planting style of the grounds.