LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE GENIUS
His clients included royalty and prime ministers. Now on the 300th anniversary of Capability Brown’s birth it has been revealed the gardener was also a savvy businessman
THEY called him “Capability” because he would tell his clients their estates had “capability” for improvement. Eventually, he was to become the most famous landscape architect of all time. Beautiful vistas were not Capability Brown’s only achievement, however: new research into his account book reveals a man who really was capable of making money grow on trees. And on the (probable) 300th anniversary of his birth, he is lauded as creating the signature English landscape design that defines our great country estates to this day.
Now a new exhibition at London’s Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library which showcases that account book reveals that Capability made the modern equivalent of a staggering £508.7million in a career that lasted just over 30 years.
The man who made the most beautiful gardens since Eden was born Lancelot Brown, the fifth child of William, a land agent and Ursula, a chambermaid in Kirkharle, Northumberland. The date (and year) of his birth is not clear but we do know he was baptised on August 30, 1716, and educated at Cambo school, leaving at the age of 16 to work as an apprentice gardener at Sir William Loraine’s kitchen garden at Kirkharle Hall. He began to work his way south, arriving at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where he was employed by Sir Richard Grenville, Lord Cobham.
There Lancelot worked for Will Kent, who was one of the founders of the revolutionary new English landscape garden movement, a direct reaction to the previously more stylised look of garden layout and a total contrast to the French formal garden. It was the philosophy Capability was to use to transform the great estates of England and, as Lord Cobham allowed him to take on freelance assignments among his aristocratic friends, Capability’s reputation began to grow.
HE WAS undoubtedly an extraordinarily gifted man, but he was also in the right place at the right time. The new fashion for landscape gardens coincided with an aristocracy that was flush with money and wanted to show it off.
Huge estates mirroring the natural landscapes were the way to do it: “The British aristocracy were spending very large sums on gardening,” says historian Professor Sir Roderick Floud, who undertook the study of Capability for the Lindley Library to accompany the publication of the account book and exhibition. “It was for a variety of reasons: you are displaying your wealth; you are providing a nice venue for holidays, love affairs and conspiracies; you are demonstrating you are in the height of fashion.
“People then regarded gardening as the equivalent to poetry and literature, as one of the arts. You could display your taste and discernment in gardening as much as in buying pictures. Brown took advantage of that.”
He was to prove a sensational success. Capability’s clients included George III, six prime ministers, seven dukes, 26 earls, 19 knights and baronets, two generals and a judge. He was paid the modern equivalent of £54million for maintaining the grounds at Hampton Court Palace, according to Professor Floud and after the king, his next highest paying client was Lord Clive, who paid him £51.8million for work at near by Claremont house in Surrey.
He earned £35.3million from the Duke of Marlborough for 11 years transforming the grounds of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, including using “tree-moving machines” and was somewhat cavalier in damming up a stream flowing under Sir John Vanbrugh’s Grand Bridge on the estate and created a far more aesthetically pleasing man- made pond – which drowned half the bridge in the process.
Capability had a prodigious workload, often running numerous major projects concurrently. An accomplished horseman, in the course of an hour he would manage to rough out a new scheme as he rode around an estate. He created large, uninterrupted swathes of grass running up to a grand house, would damn streams and rivers to create lakes, scattered trees to the side and created what became known as a “gardenless” landscape.
Another measure of his success is that although he was persuading his clients to spend an absolute fortune on their acreage, they did so knowing they would never see the completed project. After all, gardens take decades to mature.
The list of his landscape include some of the most famous estates in the land, such as Longleat (Wiltshire), Luton Hoo (Bedfordshire, Chatsworth (Derbyshire) and Althorp (Northamptonshire). It meant he could buy an estate of his own, Fenstanton in Cambridgeshire, for the modern equivalent of £21million, but surprisingly showed little interest in creating a natural landscape there.
IN 1744 he married Bridget Wayet, the daughter of a solicitor and they had six children, with two of his sons attending Eton. His only known extravagance appears to have been gambling.
After Capability’s death in 1783 his reputation suffered – the Romantic movement favoured scenes of wild drama rather than his oases of calm – but by the early 20th-century his genius had been widely recognised. Visit England calls him the “Shakespeare of English garden design.”
Many of his landscapes that had been neglected over the years are now being recreated, such as those at Lowther Castle in Cumbria. Capability himself may be long gone, but he lives on in the landscapes that have taken on a life of their own.