I first happened upon the name of ‘Capability’ Brown several years ago when I was researching the Kirkbride buildings complex in Sydney✼. I guess it was the jokey sounding name that first got my interest. I found his name historically associated with the popularising of Ha-Ha Walls (another hard-to-take-serious concept when you first encounter it without context) which is an architectural feature of Kirkbride. Brown acquired his nickname from his habit of telling clients that their land had capability for improvement [‘Highclere Castle: The real-life Downton Abbey’, (Steve McKenna), SMH, 17-Apr-2016, www.traveller.com.au].

Highclere ⇓

Capability (Christian name Lancelot) Brown’s career as a landscape gardener and designer in the 18th century was a wildly successful one. Lofty accolades cast in his direction describe him as “England’s greatest gardener” and “the Shakespeare of Gardening”. He rose from humble origins to become master gardener to George III at Hampton Court Palace, receiving over 250 commissions in his lifetime and designing in excess of 170 parks (the majority of which survive) [‘Capability Brown’, Wikipedia, http:/:en.m.wikipedia.org]. His vast oeuvre stretches over 30 counties in England and Wales, greater London and even one garden project in Germany. As artistic creators of grand physical structures go, the fecund Brown was the landscaping and gardening equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright of his day – minus the ego!

LCB

And like that prolific and seminal 20th century American architect he was very well remunerated for his efforts. From the 1760s Brown was earning £6,000 per annum (equivalent to £806,000 in 2018 money!) and £500 for a single commission [ibid.].

Classical v Romantic

As Brown was starting to learn the trade in the late 1730s, there was a fundamental change going on with landscape gardens England. The formally patterned garden with its strict geometrical order and adherence to the classical style (the embodiment of the Palladian ideal) was giving way to a new, more informal type of garden landscape✥…romantic, irregular, not conforming to order, the appearance of a natural landform [Bassin, Joan. “The English Landscape Garden in the Eighteenth Century: The Cultural Importance of an English Institution.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1979, pp. 15–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4048315].

William Kent ⇓

The new style

In the forefront of this movement towards the natural and informal was William Kent (Brown’s mentor), Charles Bridgeman and others, as well as prominent literary figures of the day like Alexander Pope. What Kent et al started, Capability Brown would go on to elevate to a higher plane.

Typical features of the Brown garden

(see also “Ha-Ha Wall” in end-note) Brown honed his landscaping style while working under Kent at Stowe (Bucks). Trademark features: smooth, undulating grass running straight to the house; the grand sweeping drive (eg, Ashridge Estate, Berrington Hall, Wimpole Estate); the woodland belt (eg, Basildon Park, Dinefwr, Ickworth); clumps and scatterings of trees (eg, Petworth Park, Stowe, Croome); the picturesque stone bridge (eg, Prior Park, Wallington, Stowe): and serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers (eg, Hatfield Forest, Stowe, Wimpole Estate); decorative garden buildings (monuments, temples, rotundas and follies◙) (eg, Clandon Park, Petworth Park, Stowe, Wallington); cedars of Lebanon🌲 (eg, Croome, Charlecote Park) [National Trust (#1) , www.nationaltrust.org.uk; ‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.]

Era of the picturesque

The picturesque was a 18th century movement in art and architecture which was a reaction to Neo–classicism with its fixation on order, proportion and exactitude. In Georgian England the picturesque influenced landscape designers like Brown (and his successor Humphry Repton) who sought to replicate the romanticised country scenes of Italian paintings in their garden projects. The features in Brown’s ‘natural’✪ garden landscapes – long vistas to lakes, bridges, lawns, ruins, groves of trees and Ha-Ha walls – were a case of real life imitating (sublime) art [‘Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton and the Picturesque’, (Janice Mills Fine Artist), (Jan-Dec 2016), http://janicemillsfineartist.wordpress.com]◇.

Social purpose

The new informal gardens in 18th century England, as typified in Brown’s landscapes, were created to underscore the growing affluence of the landowning class…showing England through their properties as they wished it to be seen, “a wealthy, educated and fertile centre of the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment”. Thus Brown’s beautiful, idyllic estate gardens were intended to resemble a romantic painted scene through the “use of local natural elements and English architecture” [ibid.].

Dinefwr Castle (Carmarthenshire) – in this Welsh estate LCB was engaged as a visiting consultant, making recommendations to the landowners

(Photo: National Trust) ⇓

Multitasker extraordinaire

Capability Brown was able to complete a vast sum of landscape projects in this career. On average, at any one time he had six projects going simultaneously, this testifies to Brown being able to work fast…an accomplished horseback rider, he could ride from site to site, survey it and knock up a rough design, all within a couple of hours. Of course even with his exceptional capacity he could only spread himself so far, when he couldn’t personally oversee projects, he would delegate to his hand-picked team of foremen, assistant surveyors and landscapers to be “hands-on” on-site and ensure that his designs were implemented properly [‘Our great ‘Capability’ Brown landscapes’, National Trust, (#2), www.nationaltrust.org.uk; ‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.].

Brown’s success as a landscape architect owed a lot to different factors…one of his virtues was his ability to choose assistants for his projects – he had a knack of picking the right people to work with, such as William Donn, John Hobcroft and Nathaniel Richmond. Brown also kept himself informed of the latest technologies. His awareness of hydraulic devices led him to utilise steam pumps employed in mining for the water features of his landscapes [Shields, Steffie. “’Mr Brown Engineer’: Lancelot Brown’s Early Work at Grimsthorpe Castle and Stowe.” Garden History, vol. 34, no. 2, 2006, pp. 174–191. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25472339].

Dissenting voices – ‘Culpability’ Brown

Despite the popularity Brown attracted for his landscape work, the Northumberland garden designer had his detractors… both from contemporaries and from critics after his time. Typical among these was Uvedale Price who criticised Brown for sweeping away all of the older trees and formal garden features in wholesale fashion (destroying the aesthetic of the classical of earlier landscapes). Similarly, architect William Chambers thought the “new manner of gardens” (code for Brown’s work) as little improvement on “common fields and vulgar nature” [‘Brown’, Wiki, op.cit.]. Certainly for these critics, the subject of their censure may have better been labelled ‘Culpability’ Brown!

Some of the invective aimed on Brown’s direction however would have derived from a more base source. Class snobbery would have been a motive for some given Brown’s modest origins – the language often used was a giveaway, detractors like architect Reginald Blomfield disparaged him as “a peasant slave from the melon ground” and having once been (allegedly) a “kitchen gardener” [Shields, loc.cit.]. Some of the opprobrium also was no doubt born out of sheer jealousy at Brown’s immense fame and financial success.

In 2016 a collection of Royal Mail stamps were issued to mark the tercentenary of LCB’s birth ⇓

A “single shaping hand”

For the many true believers though, no praise for the man known as ‘Capability’ seems high enough…one observer noted of his Highclere Castle (Hants) gardens: the location has been a designed landscape for over 1,200 years, yet Brown’s stamp is so much on the place. The remarkable result of one person imposing “his vision with sufficient force for it to have endured indefinitely” [Phipp, loc.cit.].

So successful was Capability Brown in popularising the informal garden, and so imitated was he, that he played a revolutionary role in changing the face and character of English gardens forever. In creating naturalistic landscapes he ‘copied’ nature so skilfully that “his work is often mistaken for natural landscapes” [‘How to spot a Capability Brown landscape’, [National Trust, (#1), loc.cit.].

The English Ha-Ha ⇓

End-note: The Ha-Ha: “Invisible boundaries”

The Ha-Ha Wall (AKA the sunken wall) was a defining features of a typical Capability Brown landscape garden. The Ha-Ha (French in origin) was devised to keep grazing animals out of the more formal areas of a garden, doing away with the need for a fence while creating the illusion of openness. Brown et al used it to provide unbroken vista views – from the house and garden to the parkland or countryside beyond (eg, Petworth Park, Charlecote Park, Stowe) [‘Garden Features: What are Ha-Has?’, The English Garden, 29-Oct-2014, www.theenglishgarden.co.uk].

PostScript: The test of time Remarkable also are the number of country gardens sculpted by Brown that have remained intact (or at least partly so). Around 150 survive – including Alnwick Castle (Northumberland), Blenheim Palace (Oxfds), Basildon Park (Berks), Croome Park (Worcs), Stowe House and Stoke Park (Bucks), Berrington Hall (Hertfds), Milton Abbey and Abbas (Dorset), Clandon Park (Surrey), Charlecote Park (Warws), Chatsworth House (Derbys), Petworth Park (Sussex), Warwick Castle (Warws), Wimpole Estate (Cambs), Wallington (East Yorks), Hatfield Forrest (Essex), Harewood House (West Yorks), Ashridge Estate (Hertfds), Appuldurcombe House (Isle of Wight), Ickworth (Suffolk), Belvoir Castle (Leics), Dinefwr Castle (Wales), Kew Gardens (Lond) and of course Highclere, these days more famous for the location of the TV series “Downton Abbey”.⇑ Brown’s penchant for lakes & bridges (Photo: National Trust)

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✼ ‘Callan Park: The Kirkbride Experiment, a Microcosm of “Good Intentions” ‘, December 2015 blog

✥ this trend had a paradoxical component to it…as the born-to-rule gentry were opting for country homes which were smaller, the gardens were becoming larger [Bassin, loc.cit.] – which of course suited landscape gardeners like Brown given to broad canvasses

◙ follies are decorative, usually non-functional, buildings that enhance the planned landscape, Brown used mock Roman villas, Medieval ruins, etc

🌲 evergreen conifers

✪ Brown’s gardens were of course not natural in any organically occurring sense, but carefully and meticulously contrived to both look natural and to convey “a sense of informality” [‘Capability Brown’, Britain Express, www.britainexpress.com

◇ Brown’s vistas contained no clear delineation between house, parkland and natural environment giving the landscapes a seamless appearance [Mills, op.cit.]