Capability Brown

Sponsorship the way you would do it

Lancelot Brown (1715/1716 - February 6, 1783), more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English landscape gardener, perhaps the first of his kind.

Born in Northumberland, he was employed by various landed families to improve the layout of their gardens, and worked at Blenheim Palace, Kew Gardens, Warwick Castle, Bowood House, Milton Abbey (and nearby Milton Abbas village) and many other locations.

Brown laid out his Brownian parklands at an accelerated pace around England. This man who refused work in Ireland because he had not finished England was called ÃÂÃÂCapabilityÃÂÃÂ Brown because he was ÃÂÃÂcapableÃÂÃÂ of seeing the ÃÂÃÂcapabilitiesÃÂÃÂ within the landscape.

His style of smooth undulating grass in which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts, scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes were a new style within the English landscape and hence opened Brown for criticism by many landscape theorists. ÃÂÃÂOwen Cambridge declared that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could see heaven before it was ÃÂÃÂimprovedÃÂÃÂ; this was a typical statement that brought on much controversy over the last 200 years about Brown's work.

However Brown has not only been criticised he has also be praised by many notable authors after all his landscapes were the forefront of fashion and they were basically different to what was existing in England. The well-known formal gardens of England were removed by Brown and replaced with his grammatical landscapes.

Russell Page described BrownÃÂÃÂs process as ÃÂÃÂencouraging his wealthy clients to tear out their splendid formal gardens and replace them with his facile compositions of grass, tree clumps and rather shapeless pools and lakesÃÂÃÂ . Where as a recent historian and author, Richard Bisgrove described Brown's process as perfecting nature by ÃÂÃÂjudicious manipulation of its components, adding a tree here or a concealed head of water there. His art attended to the formal potential of ground, water, trees and so gave to English landscape itÃÂÃÂs ideal forms. The difficulity was that less capable imitators and less sophisticated spectators did not see nature perfectedÃÂÃÂ.. they saw simply what they took to be natureÃÂÃÂ.