A Victorian palm house 27 m by 21 m inside its plinth, laid out on the pack's own 3 m bay. The shell is complete at eye level: a stepped stone plinth right round, cast iron bay frames on top of it, corner bays closing all four angles, a glazed apse on the north wall, the entrance doors in the middle of the south wall and a curved eaves run above. It is deliberately open topped over the planting. The pack page looks down into the house and a walk through it has no way up, so a glazed roof over the beds would hide the whole collection: the barrel vault and its lantern ridge are laid over the north walk alone, three bays of it on the cast iron columns, which is enough to show what the roof does. The gallery walkway and the spiral stair hang over the west aisle at 3.2 m, above head height, so they read as structure rather than as somewhere to stand, and everything worth seeing is at ground level. Flagged walks run from the doors to the fountain and across the house; the lily pond sits in the south west quarter with its coping closed on all four sides, the fern pit and the rockery in the north east, raised beds in every quarter and the arid group at the far end. The collection is planted the way a palm house is planted, densely: tall palms on the open floor, half grown palms in the beds, tree ferns, bananas, cycads, bird of paradise, bromeliads, orchids, bamboo, ferns and moss underneath, climbers trained up the walls and baskets under the gallery. The working end is in the north west angle behind a brick screen, with the boiler house door, the flue, the coal chute, the water tank, the potting bench, the seed cabinet, tool rack, pot stacks and a barrow. Heating pipes run along the south wall, grating covers the west trench, the misting line crosses the west beds and the ventilator shafting runs down the east aisle to its crank.