This year is the 300th anniversary of the birth of one of England’s great landscape gardeners. Gillian Vine reports.
He was nicknamed Capability for his assertion, when looking at clients' properties, that there was the "capability'' for improvement and it is by this name that Lancelot Brown has gone down in garden history.
Born in August 1716, he is considered England's first professional landscape consultant. He designed almost 200 gardens, all huge, sweeping around the stately homes of his often-titled clientele. Commissions such as Hampton Court, Audley End, Chatsworth and Longleat demonstrate where Brown's interests - and skills - lay. No quarter-acre plots for this landscaper but naturalistic plantings on a grand scale.
The gardens he designed would have ensured his fame but perhaps Brown's more important contribution was in spreading the taste for scenic effects. This, in turn, was to see the sweeping away of many of the elegant Italianate designs of William Kent (1685-1748), although some - such as Chiswick and Kensington Gardens, in London, and Claremont, in Surrey - still show Kent's influence even after Brown's changes.
Brown's hallmarks were linked lakes that gave the impression of a river, unexpected vistas, statuary and follies, trees planted near the tops of hills so the entire horizon was screened and specimen trees dotting parkland "like punctuation marks'', as English TV gardener Alan Titchmarsh has described them. Palladian bridges, a Kent favourite, are also likely to be found in Brown's landscapes.
Notable among Brown's gardens are Highclere Castle in Hampshire, where Downton Abbey was filmed; Hampton Court Palace, where as head gardener he refused to have the topiaried trees clipped; Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of British wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill, where Brown flooded a valley to get the effect he sought; and Stowe, where he worked from 1741-51 and rose from under-gardener to William Kent to head gardener. There, as well as bridges, obelisks and statuary, he used the sunken walls of ha-has to keep livestock out of the garden and present an uninterrupted view across the parkland.
There is a Dunedin connection in one of Brown's gardens: the 36ha garden at Hartwell House, Buckinghamshire, is where Harry Clarke, writer of the original Star Garden Book, was trained in gardens laid out about 1750 by Capability Brown. Hartwell's grounds resemble nearby Stowe, with statues, an obelisk and ha-ha.
Brown's ongoing influence is still seen in large gardens, with specimen European trees standing alone in paddocks or parkland and the use of the
ha-ha to give a vista without fences to mar the view. In this country, the reason for creating a lake would be to water stock, while sculpture tends to be on a smaller scale than Brown's grand obelisks but specimen trees are popular and ha-has occasionally seen.
Not all Brown's plans were executed. At Princess Diana's home, Althorp, Northamptonshire, the grounds had been landscaped in the 1660s by French landscape architect André Le Nôtre, the genius behind the gardens at Versailles. A century later, Althorp was visited by Brown, who suggested changes, but by the time of his death three years later, nothing had been done. As he tended to present a plan as a sales pitch, it is possible his design still survives in Althorp's archives.
This certainly was the case at Belvoir (pronounced "beaver'') Castle in Leicestershire. There, Emma, Duchess of Rutland, discovered plans drawn up in 1780, the same year Brown was at Althorp. Also in the archive is a rather sad letter from Brown written in October 1782, four months before his death at the age of 66. In it, he urged the fourth duke to implement his plan.
However, it was not until last year that the work was undertaken under the guidance of Alan Titchmarsh and documented in a TV programme,Titchmarsh on Capability Brown. The project was driven by the energetic duchess, who found that even a budget of 200,000 ($400,000) was not enough to do everything Brown wanted, although the main elements are now there.
It could rightly be dubbed Brown's last masterpiece, implemented 232 years after his death.
