Theodore Mander commissioned the building of a new house on Wightwick Bank in 1887 to a design by Edward Ould. From early photographs, there was already a garden at Wightwick but wanting to update the design to reflect the changes to the house, Mander consulted the artist and landscape designer Alfred Parsons and his partner Captain Partridge. This was one of their first commissions.

Parsons was not a fan of the site. He wrote to Partridge: ‘The immediate surroundings of the house [are] about as bad as it could be’ and had mixed-feeling about Mander’s character: ‘He (Mander) is a varnish manufacturer in Wolverhampton, but not a self-made type – a university man and very pleasant. So is his wife, who is Canadian and much easier to deal with than he is. I should think by his evident anxiety about money that he is very rich, and I don’t think you will find him an easy subject to tackle.’ But after Mander’s early death in 1900, it’s unclear how much work Parsons and Partridge carried out.

In 1904, Theodore’s widow, Flora Mander, invited the landscape designer Thomas Mawson to Wightwick. Probably known to her through his design work for Wolverhampton’s East Park, Mawson began by creating two level terraces to the south of the house. Mawson understood the importance of the design working for his clients. He created a formal setting near the house, with a more informal and natural setting further away.

Work stopped again on the garden when Mrs Mander died in 1905 but was completed five years later for her son, the Liberal MP, Geoffrey Mander.

In 1912 the garden was illustrated in the fourth edition of Mawson’s The Art and Craft of Garden Making.

In 1937 Geoffrey Mander gave the house to the National Trust. He and his second wife Rosalie continued to live at Wightwick, opening its doors to the public. They added to its contents with paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Marie Spartali Stillman, Elizabeth Siddal and many others. The collection now forms one of the largest public collections of work by female artists in Britain.

The gardens were later further developed and extended by the Manders. After a period of decline, restoration of the gardens began c1990 based on designs in Mawson’s Catalogue of 1905.