The home of the Dovaston family – who were said to have been resident in the vicinity of West Felton since the time of Elizabeth I – is no more. After lying deserted when the family moved to New Zealand in 1966, the house and richly wooded grounds were offered for sale as a ‘development opportunity’. This opportunity involved demolition of the house in the late 1980s to make way for the inevitable housing development. Several of the new houses have notable surviving trees and other features of the gardens contained within their limited parameters.

The builder of the original house in the late eighteenth century was John Dovaston (1740–1808), the eldest of seven children of a wheelwright. Sent as a cow boy to the attorney Thomas Milward of Wollescote Hall near Stourbridge, he eventually became his clerk and then an attorney in his own right, but preferred the life of a rural gentleman. He retired to The Nursery but not before he had been ‘eminently successful in two voyages…to the West Indies, to settle an arbitration amicably and to prevent litigation’. During this time he made the acquaintance of 1st Lord Lyttelton (1724–1808), then Governor of Jamaica, who was also the owner of Hagley Park in Worcestershire with its influential landscape park. Interestingly he is also said, from his youth, to have been a close friend of William Shenstone, the poet and owner of the landscape garden at The Leasowes, at Halesowen, ‘to whose memory he was always much attached; and from whom he probably caught his early ideas in elegantly disposing of grounds’.

Within his grounds in 1777, he planted the weeping Dovaston yew, which still remains, and from which all Taxus Baccata Dovastonii descend. Dovaston was – with John Evans of Llwynygroes – one of the chief promoters behind the building of a memorial column on the Breidden to Admiral Lord Rodney in 1782. This monument is still in view from the site of The Nursery and would, when first built, have been the ultimate eye-catcher for the house.