by Jane Brown
To improve14 an old family seat,
By lawning a hundred good acres of wheat.
It was Price who wrote of Lancelot, ‘this fellow crawls15 like a snail all over the grounds and leaves his cursed slime behind him wherever he goes’.
Oddly, it was William Mason’s innovatory flower garden at Nuneham that was ‘little clumps, knots & patches of flowers’, and was to become so popular an expression of the Picturesque. There were many confused notions; but it would appear that Lancelot’s name and legacy were saved by controversy, there being no such thing as bad publicity.
And, all the time, there was a thin stream of appreciation: the good William Mason did not let him down, in his late sonnet of 1797, ‘To a Gravel Walk’:16
Smooth, simple Path! Whose undulating line,
With sidelong tufts of flow’ring fragrance crown’d,
Plain, in its neatness, spans my garden ground;
…
Liberal though limited, restrain’d though free,
Fearless of dew, or dirt, or dust I rove,
And own those comforts all deriv’d from thee!
Take then, smooth Path, this tribute of my love,
Thou emblem pure of legal liberty!
Here is remembrance of Frances Irwin and Lancelot’s path at Temple Newsam, which kept her slippers out of the mud, and all his other serpentine, domed, gravelled garden paths, symbols of liberty.
Also in 1797 the fourth edition of Dr William Mavor’s New Description of Blenheim sported a refreshing wisdom:
[Brown] saw the deformity17 of perverted beauty with keener optics than Kent, he viewed nature with the enthusiasm of a lover; and though it cannot be denied that he sometimes tricked her out in meretricious ornaments, and patched her with too refined an art, he never lost sight of her prominent charms; and his worst errors can only be considered as minute pimples on a beautiful face.
The trouble, according to Dr Mavor, was that Brown – ‘originally bred a gardener’ – had given ‘every person who can superintend a kitchen-garden, or handle a spade’ the idea to ‘quit his sphere and attempt design’, regardless of possessing ‘a particle’ of Lancelot’s genius. This of course was to be the disease of decades to come.
That shrewd observer, Arthur Young, found time to appreciate both Croome and Rothley: at Croome (in Annals of Agriculture, 1801) he felt the Malverns themselves to be so deliberately placed as to complete the scene, the house was ‘excellent’ and the serpentine sheet of water that wound through the park ‘one of the most perfect pieces of garden scenery’, and clearly the means of effective drainage. He admired Lancelot’s 80-foot cedar, a birch and Turkey oak beside the water, and went on in his praises for the horticultural delights that the Coventrys had added, the shrubberies, greenhouses and hothouses, the orangery and the American borders: ‘nothing too crowded’, nor jumbled – all is nature, ‘not a thistle or a weed can be seen, not a single tree or shrub is out of its proper place’. At Rothley, Young had found Lancelot’s ‘very fine new made lake’ some years earlier (in volume 3 of his Tour, 1771): ‘the bends and curves of the bank are bold and natural, & when the trees get up, the whole spot will be remarkably beautiful’. (Young found the Wallington estate roads, made by George Brown, ‘a piece of magnificence which cannot be too much praised’ and the new hedges ‘remarkably good’; the kitchen garden was ‘admirable’, and Wallington was ‘the only place I have viewed, as a stranger, where no fees were taken’.)
There was one other ‘bred a gardener’ whose career in the nineteenth century has interesting parallels to Lancelot’s, and that was Joseph Paxton:18 there are similarities between the twenty-five-year-old Lancelot ringing the bell for admittance on his arrival at Stowe and the nervous Paxton, aged twenty-three, presenting himself at Chatsworth early one morning in 1826, seventy-five years later. At Chatsworth, Paxton found Lancelot’s techniques of drainage, land-sculpture and drive-layout waiting for him, as practical demonstrations; undoubtedly the 6th Duke of Devonshire had to stay Paxton’s hand and preserve Brown’s Chatsworth, but he encouraged Paxton in other ways: to the construction of rock-works, the remaking of the Emperor Fountain and the Cascade, and the building of his glass and stove houses – these being Paxton’s apprenticeship for the Crystal Palace of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Paxton worked for the Rothschild family, and in 1853 at the Château de Ferrières (about 20 miles east of Paris) he dammed a stream and created a ‘Brownian’ lake, ‘planting trees in subtle groups on the banks’. He also transferred the ‘Brownian’ techniques to his design for Birkenhead Park, Liverpool’s resort across the Mersey and the first public park. The site was swampy, needing drainage and lakes, with landforms and a serpentine path system, as well as varied planting, to make it both interesting and enjoyable. Paxton was blessed with better health than Lancelot, and with catholic ambitions – he was a journalist, author, magazine proprietor, railway promoter and a Member of Parliament; when he died in 1865 he was a very rich man, with a knighthood.
Birkenhead Park, in the making, was seen by a young visitor from America, Frederick Law Olmsted, who had landed at Liverpool at the end of May in 1850. Olmsted also saw Lancelot’s Wynnstay and Eaton Hall, and then he and his companions headed for London, by way of the Wye valley, Bath, the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth, ‘more than three hundred miles,19 most of it on foot, in twenty-three days at the cost of seventy-one cents a day per man’. Wales and England in June – eulogised by Olmsted as ‘Dear old mother England’ and met face to face, and found to be ‘a better garden-republic’ than his own country, fired Olmsted’s ambition to design landscapes. Birkenhead Park influenced his designs for Central Park in New York.
Olmsted was a loyal republican with little sympathy for the landed aristocrats, but on leaving the Grosvenors’ park at Eaton he made a note in his diary: ‘What artist, so noble20 … as he who, with far-reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outline, writes the colors, and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he has arranged for her shall realise his intentions.’ His note was to himself, a reminder of what he might achieve, but it must have been prompted by seeing, or being told of, Lancelot’s £800 worth of landscape plan that was being put in hand on the Grosvenor estate. On a subsequent visit to England, Olmsted saw Trentham and Charlecote. When, after his harrowing experiences as a medic in the Civil War, which ended in 1865, and his campaign to save the giant-redwood forests of Yosemite, Olmsted finally settled to park-making, his landscape practice became the largest and most influential in America and trained a whole generation of landscape architects. In the serene expanses of meadow and lake in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, in the woodland drives through housing along the Des Moines River at Riverside, on the outskirts of Chicago and in miles of scenic parkways, Lancelot Brown’s methods were reborn into the exhilarating New World.
* * *
In Lancelot’s home country the second half of the nineteenth century was a low time for the appreciation of his parks, if not quite the lowest. Victorian architects and horticulturists actively disliked the image of a Palladian villa floating in a sea of grass, and the most extreme solution was to rebuild the ‘vila’ in the neo-Gothic style, with added formal gardens. Some of Lancelot’s most famous parks found themselves distanced from their houses by stupendous terrace constructions or acres of balustraded flower gardens: notably Coombe Abbey, Trentham, Harewood, Castle Ashby, Bowood, Luton Hoo and Blenheim, although there were many smaller examples. Sometimes – as at Coombe Abbey and Trentham – these flower terraces were made in the name of restoration, from the old gardens that Lancelot had supposedly swept away. (At this remove in time, supposition – the hazy recall of some aged gardener – was adequate evidence in itself, and no one bothered to find out the truth.) In the worst cases the whole relationship between the house and its landscape was confused and disorientated; at best the new terraces, with their spreads of coloured gravels cut into c
urlicues, ribbon-bordered hearts and ovals, monograms in box, vases, statues and water-spouts, were so greedy of labour and resources that the parks were left in peace.
A semblance of peace remained throughout the Edwardian era of great shooting parties, when the parks were planted, with rhododendrons and other evergreen ‘coverts’. Many estates surrendered the woods that Lancelot had planted in the name of a patriotic duty for the Great War effort. After the war, the deaths of the young as well as the old, and taxes, brought the country society that had paid for – and worked for – Lancelot to its knees. The Twenties were a nadir for the great houses and their estates, and many were carved into lots, stripped of their valuables and sold, even that ‘Work to wonder at’: Lancelot’s Stowe. For many of his parks their future was to be ploughed up, built over or excavated for gravel – the luckier ones fell into institutional or public ownership. Land and landscape may theoretically be indestructible, but their spirit can be broken.
The rest of the twentieth-century story is fairly briefly told: Christopher Hussey’s The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View of 1927 was a reminder of the seemingly lost world of the eighteenth century. Hussey wrote from the high-Victorian library of his home, Scotney Castle at Lamberhurst in Kent, which had its own ruined castle and fern-fringed quarry in a garden of rhododendrons. In his quest for the origins of Picturesque taste, he lifted the heavy velvet drapes of Victoriana that had obscured the past. Others were only too aware of London’s eighteenth-century streets and buildings at risk, and after a campaign against the proposed demolition of Nash’s Carlton House Terrace, the Georgian Group was formed in 1937 with an avowal to champion the conservation of eighteenth-century buildings, including country houses.
Then came another war: with every country house of any size requisitioned into war use, their lawns covered with Nissen huts, their woods concealing tanks or ammunition dumps (which so frequently exploded), the longing for serenity – dimly positioned in the life of the houses in an England ‘that was’ – became far wider than the lot of a few architectural historians. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, published in December 1944, was a subtle propaganda to divert any sympathy for the decline of the eccentric Flytes towards the much greater pending tragedy, the loss of their house – imagined as Castle Howard – its architecture, art and contents and the gardens and park, these values entrusted to the character of Charles Ryder. War on the home front not only introduced thousands of soldiers, nurses and evacuated schoolchildren to the fragile beauties of these houses and their landscapes, but inspired a widespread dream of a restoration of their peace.
It was into this post-war longing that Dorothy Stroud21 published her Capability Brown in 1950, her researches held up by her own war work. Her cataloguing and locating of more than 200 of his works was a revelation, and a source for a thousand references, especially because, with the Festival of Britain in 1951, there was an official desire to find places of interest for visitors from overseas. Thus it was that the heirs to Lancelot’s parks revealed that they were not finished yet; the opening of country houses to visitors really saved Lancelot Brown’s legacy, beginning with Lord Bath at Longleat. Though there had been paying visitors as long as there had been country houses, the efficiency with which this was picked up from the haphazard ‘shillings in the bucket’ method of the 1930s was astounding. Very soon there was a scramble to add the line ‘Park by Capability Brown’ to the houses’ listings, for it was a real ‘feather in the cap’. A 1960 guide, price 3s. 6d., to 500 Historic Houses and Castles open to the public contains no fewer than thirty-four of Lancelot’s parks. A recent edition of Hudson’s Historic Houses & Gardens, now so weighty, has sixty Brown places. At least another dozen of his parks are publicly owned and open, and others can most likely be seen upon request. (The National Trust has fourteen, and these include Berrington, Charlecote, Clandon, Croome, Dinefwr, Petworth, Stowe and Wimpole).
In the 1970s the scourge of Dutch Elm disease led to the death and destruction of the elms that Lancelot had loved to plant. In 1987 and again in 1990 the Great Storm and its successor, which swept across southern England when the trees were in full leaf, felled whole swathes of his woodlands, especially the shallow-rooted beech trees. But the storm of October 1987 was the proverbial ‘ill wind’, for the traumatic effects of its passage galvanised English Heritage’s process of surveying and assessing the designed parks, and produced government funds for their restoration. Of course, funding and even quangos are transient, and diseases and storms are inevitable, but the Register of the parks and their descriptions is a solid safeguard. Those that are open – and many have free access and are enjoyed for weekend leisure pursuits – are firmly embedded in the affections of the nation.
However, in Britain, the heirs to Lancelot’s profession have had a longer struggle than in America, for there has been no equivalent of the messianic Fred Olmsted, nor do we have such exhilarating expanses of space to fill. The Institute of Landscape Architects was founded in 1929, but on rather Reptonian, ‘gardenesque’ principles, confined to exquisite layouts for public parks, playgrounds and small housing developments. It was only in the late 1950s that people’s perceptions awoke to an increase in the scale of living – it was as if our individual human scale had been multiplied by four – and the new unit was the load of a family car. New towns, new roads, new power stations and water supplies were needed, and for this alien scale of design Lancelot Brown’s methods were resurrected and used. The landscape architect Sylvia Crowe, who was a consultant to the Ministry of Transport, the Forestry Commission and the power undertakings, and who designed Rutland Water, wrote:
It is particularly necessary22 to be able to handle contours when artificial lakes are to be made. Capability Brown was a master of this, as he was of all problems of contouring. His critics’ complaints that his slopes were too smooth for a natural effect may surely be discounted, when we see how the easy, graceful sweeps and slopes have stood the test of time, in a way that a picturesquely crumbling bank could never have done. His sheets of water lie naturally within the land-form. If there is a headland, the slight swell on the ground suggests it as a natural formation, if the water widens out, it does so into a gentle basin.
If you have the opportunity to travel the road between Stamford and Oakham, along the north bank of Rutland Water, the truth of these words will be vividly illustrated; the Oakham to Stamford, west–east views are perhaps even more exhilarating, and all are infinitely variable at different times of day or seasons. If you have time for a closer acquaintance with Rutland Water, as the signs repeatedly invite you to, you will realise its capacity to delight sailors, walkers, fishermen, bird-watchers, cyclists and picnic parties – and that it is the pride of this small county. But there are many other evidences of the extrapolation of Mr Brown’s skills into the service of our twenty-first-century landscape – the satisfactory ‘roll-out’ of views from a newer (free-running) motorway (the M40 is a fine example), the redeeming green slopes of restorations of old coal or mineral workings, and the lifting of the deadening green blanket of coniferous planting from beautiful bare mountains. These things are often so subtle that we take them for granted; Sylvia Crowe and her landscape colleagues and successors have been only too aware that, when they have done their job properly, no one realises they have done anything at all. For, like Lancelot Brown and all his flirtations with Dame Nature, she will have the last word:
The world’s little malice will balk his design:
Each fault they’ll call his, and each excellence mine.
fn1 Lawn-tennis courts, croquet and miniature golf lawns were not designed into gardens and public parks until the late nineteenth century, and were the outcome of improved lawn-seed mixes by Suttons and other seedsmen.
fn2 Knight was a follower of Charles James Fox and those who supported the beginnings of the revolution in France, until the reports of brutality and bloodshed changed their minds.
FOUR PATRONS WHO LAUNCHED LANCELOT’
S CAREER
Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham (1675-1749), by Jean-Baptiste van Loo, 1740.
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham (1708-1778), by William Hoare, c.1754.
George Lucy of Charlecote (1714-1786), by Pompeo Batoni, 1758.
George William, 6th Earl of Coventry (1722-1809), by Allan Ramsay, 1765.
The matchless vale of Thames, an extract from Roque’s Middlesex, showing Hammersmith, the Brown family’s home 1751-64, amidst the productive landscape that stretched from Kensington to Kew.
Wakefield Lawn, Northamptonshire, Paul Sandby, 1767, showing the landscape setting Lancelot made for the 2nd Duke of Grafton’s hunting lodge, adjacent to Stowe.
Petworth, Dewy Morning, J.M.W. Turner, 1810, the view taken across Lancelot’s first lake towards the west front of Petworth house.
Claude, Landscape with Hagar and the Angel. Several landscapes by Claude were in houses that Lancelot visited and they influenced his framing of views and siting of buildings.
Croome Court, Richard Wilson, 1758: the view of Lancelot’s landscape from the south-west, with the Court rebuilt in the Hagley style, Lancelot’s rotunda to the right, his new church on the hill (not finished until 1763) and the William Halfpenny pattern-book white wooden bridge.