Shute House, Donhead St Mary, Wiltshire, England is a former rectory, now a private home, notable for its gardens designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe. Situated about east of Shaftesbury, the house and garden are at the very southern edge of Wiltshire, on the border with Dorset. The house is a Grade II listed building, while the gardens have a higher Grade II* listing on Historic England's Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. They have been described as Jellicoe's finest work. He worked at Shute House between 1969 and 1983 for the then owners, Michael and Anne Tree, returning to revitalise the garden for new owners in the mid-1990s, in what became his final work before his death in 1996. History Shute House has a central position in the small village of Donhead St Mary, about 250m northwest of St Mary's Church. A 16th-century rectory house survives as one range of the present house. In the early 18th century, a new range was added, of three bays and faced in ashlar. In the 1940s, the Church of England sold the rectory and it became a private home. Renamed Shute House in 1955, it was designated a Grade II listed building in 1966. In 1968, the house was bought by Lady Anne Tree, and her husband, Michael. Lady Anne, a sister of the 11th Duke of Devonshire, was a noted prison reformer and her husband, Michael, was the son of Nancy Lancaster, the interior designer. They had earlier lived at Mereworth Castle in Kent, and had a connection to Geoffrey Jellicoe though work he had undertaken for Nancy and Ronald Tree at Ditchley Park in the 1930s. By the time of his work at Shute House, Jellicoe had become one of England's most successful landscape gardeners. Training originally as an architect, he moved into landscape gardening in the 1930s, helping to establish the Institute of Landscape Architects and becoming the founding president of the International Federation of Landscape Architects. During a 60-year career, he designed a series of major gardens, both in the United Kingdom and worldwide. He also made a significant contribution to landscape gardening theory; exploring, in particular, links between design and the subconscious, in which he was much influenced by the ideas of Carl Jung, and the use of water in design. The joint work Jellicoe wrote with his wife, Susan Pares, Water: The Use of Water in Landscape Architecture,