Making Mother Nature do mankind’s bidding is a landscape designer’s charge, taming willful fecundity into orderly paradises, brightly flowered and smartly hedged. The venturesome Lancelot Brown, however—nicknamed Capability for the word he often used to describe a promising acreage—rejected such fussiness. Instead, the garden maestro, whose 300th birthday all of Britain is celebrating (capabilitybrown.org has the merrymaking details), sired triumphantly natural-seeming panoramas that rolled, dipped, and shimmered.
“This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England”—Brown planted the idealized England that Shakespeare had evoked. His parklands for aristos and nabobs “look so natural that we are instantly at ease in them,” says Sarah Rutherford, author of the National Trust’s new book Capability Brown and His Landscape Gardens. They are practical, too, she adds, blending “agriculture, sport, forestry, wildlife havens, recreation,…
