This year has been the
tercentenary of Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, the eighteenth century
landscape designer. So we have had lots of coverage in the garden,
and other, media. As you have probably guessed, its not a subject
that high on my radar otherwise I would have written about him
before.
Brown was prolific,
accomplished, technically skilled, highly competent and a good
businessman. He also came from a relatively humble background, and we
all like a good story of social mobility don't we? Especially in
these times when this vital social factor is pretty bad, and even
worse in the United States, which used to pride itself on this. As a
topical aside, on the subject of social mobility try googling: Donald
Trump, grandfather and brothel.
Brown has been labelled
a vandal. I am sure anyone familiar with garden history will be
familiar with the charge, but basically it is this: Britain, prior to his
mid 18th century blitz around the landscapes of the
wealthy, had a fine array of formal and quasi-formal gardens. Brown
dug them all up, consigning the hedges and topiary to the flames and
laid out rolling green acres, informal clumps of trees and lakes
instead. His career did feature a series of style changes, and
sometimes did work around existing features, but basically he did
just do the same thing again and again. And again. And again. Very
profitably, thank you.
The English landscape
garden, of rolling green acres and little clumps of trees, was a huge
innovation. But it was not Brown's. As Tim Richardson shows in his
masterly and readable book The Arcadian Friends. Brown simply
codified an existing trend, ironed out the originality and
idiosyncratic artistry and commodified an idea. “The Brown brand
resulted in a green monotony across England” he writes, and “formulaic”. Indeed. Especially as one of Brown's great innovations was
the combining of hay-making or livestock rearing on land which
previously had supported only lines of trees and non-agricultural
grassland. This helped feed people I suppose, but it was a jolly good
line to sell to landowners – 'be trendy and utilitarian and make
money at the same time'.
I can't help feeling
that we have lost an awful lot thanks to Brown. One only has to look
at early 18th century Kip and Knyff landscape prints to realise just how much. Most of
these would of course have changed or been degraded in time without
Brown, but his impact must nevertheless have been enormous. The results
are a kind of fake naturalism, looking rural because there are no
straight lines. The average Brown landscape is successful because it
takes the savannah-parkland look we are arguably hard wired to
appreciate (thanks to our out-of-Africa heritage), and opens it out,
giving it a stamp of the artistic.As any hedgerow ecologist will tell you, trees and grass are not necessarily a particularly natural or biodiverse habitat.
Photographing Brown
landscapes is remarkably difficult. They all look so unintentional,
which is part of his skill as a designer of course. The pictures here
are all of Berrington Hall, near Ludlow, Shrops. The little cloth
figurine and teacup plantings were all from an exhibition there
earlier in the year. (details sadly lost).
It was an African
heritage friend (and garden historian) who asked me “where did all
the money come from to employ Brown?”. Slavery of course. 18th
century Britain had an economy that benefited enormously from slavery
and the sugar trade, which was itself built on slavery. This was not by any
means the worst episode of slavery in the world – the Romans and
the Muslim world have been far worse, but it was the most hideous
period in European history. So, next time you admire a Brown
landscape, think about where the money comes from.
