Celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of iconic landscape architect Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, HANNAH 
STEPHENSON looks at his legacy and how we can enjoy his work during the Capability Brown Festival 2016

HE is said to be to landscaping what Turner is to painting, and Wordsworth to poetry. And the legacy of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown remains for us all to see in gardens both in Wiltshire and further afield.

Now, the public has a chance to see his work in all its glory during the Capability Brown Festival, being launched on February 25, which brings together a huge range of events, openings and exhibitions featuring historic landscapes, from horse and carriage rides to art exhibitions to cycling trails.

His designs changed the face of the 18th century British landscape, creating rolling parkland, flowing rivers and serpentine lakes.

He was considered by some to be a genius, and by others as a destructive force, as he swept away formal knot gardens to make way for his more natural landscapes.

His nickname of ‘Capability’ is thought to have come from his describing landscapes as having “great capabilities”.

During his 32-year career as a landscape gardener and ‘place-maker’, he shaped more than 170 estates including Bowood in Wiltshire, Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

Born in 1716, one of six children to a yeoman farmer in Northumberland, Brown’s daily walk to school from Kirkharle to Cambo across the Wallington estate may have inspired his designs.

He began work as a gardener at the country house of Kirkharle before going to Stowe in Buckinghamshire, now a National Trust property, where he took responsibility for the architectural and landscaping works in the garden. In 1764, he was appointed King George III’s Master Gardener at Hampton Court Palace.

His revolutionary ideas were taken up by other 18th century designers, and it wasn’t too long before great Scottish houses and castles became surrounded by the parkland and naturalistic planting schemes that typify the period.

Brown’s style was derived from the two practical principles of comfort and elegance: that everything should work and that a landscape should provide for every need of the great house, as well as cohere and look elegant.

While his designs have great variety, they also appear seamless, owing to his use of the sunk fence or ‘ha-ha’ to confuse the eye into believing that different pieces of parkland, though managed and stocked quite differently, were one.

His expansive lakes formed a single body of water as if a river through the landscape, like the parkland itself, ran on indefinitely.

Toby Buckland, horticulturist, writer and TV presenter, says: “At Bowood, Wiltshire, where I have my summer garden festival, ‘Capability’ planted belts of trees as his picture frame and streams expanded into a serpentine lake as a focal point.

“It’s masterful, magical and a wonderful place to be. No wonder his work has stood the test of time.”

Designed in 1762, the Bowood grounds boast an extensive arboretum and pinetum, including 11 champion trees with a further 700 trees identified and labelled within the grounds. Central to the design of the park is Brown’s great lake, almost a mile long, winding sinuously like an enormous river.

Ceryl Evans, Capability Brown Festival 2016 director, explains: “He transformed the country’s landscape by using trees, meadows and water features on an extraordinary scale, bringing them together to create designs that became quintessentially English historic landscapes.”

As we enjoy spring and summer days out at properties which have been influenced by his work, we may take his landscaping for granted in a way that was predicted in his obituary: “Where he is the happiest man he will be least remembered, so closely did he copy nature his works will be mistaken”.

l For details of events in the Capability Brown Festival 2016, go to www.capabilitybrown.org.