This watercolour depicts in pure summer colours the garden of Nash's childhood home in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire - a domestic landscape that dominated his earliest work. Shortly before Nash's first exhibition in November 1912 at the fashionable Carfax Gallery, he returned to live at Iver Heath with his father. 'The Garden at Wood Lane House, Iver Heath' is inspired by the illustrations of William Blake, a significant influence upon Nash's first abortive career as a bookplate designer, as well as the wistful romanticism of the pre-Raphaelites, Burne-Jones and Rossetti in particular. Nash's early watercolours of summer trees and gardens are among his most obviously romantic, though the frequent absence of figures often gives them an air of melancholy or mystery. Eric Ravilious, another significant British watercolourist from the first half of the century, and one who was taught by Nash whilst a student at the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s, used the same conceit to similar effect throughout his career.

In a revealing letter written in August 1912 to the wife of his friend Gordon Bottomley, Nash explained how his landscape drawings "are very real to me and I feel I succeed better in ‘finding myself’ thro’ them than in any other direction. Nature is there before me, & any thoughts of how other people would express what I see there do not intrude on my mind – I go ahead my own way. But left to my imagination & invention entirely I know I sometimes become influenced by men like Rossetti [and] Blake …"

In 1933 the critic Frank Rutter would recall the ‘curious child-like charm’ of these pre-War watercolours of English landscapes by Nash and his brother. ‘They were extraordinarily innocent in their vision and simple in their handling and construction’, he wrote, ‘yet their simplicity was not at all the kind of simplification which passed current in Paris; it was something essentially English, distantly connected with the Pre-Raphaelite outlook, only pruned of their passion for irrelevant details.’