Capability Brown and Landscape Gardening (p. 27)

Lancelot Brown, referred to as “Capability Brown” for his aptness in landscape improvement, was an English landscape architect born in the early 1700s—called “England’s greatest gardener,” he designed over 170 parks (of which many are still visible today). Gardening in the most esteemed estates and country houses in Britain, his style was recognizable—including swelling grasses, unique dispersions of trees, and twisting rivers that branched off into smaller damming rivers, all of which overtook the previous formal patterning of English gardening. Considered highly fashionable, Capability Brown’s landscape gardening was in defiance of the older gardening forms that had been critiqued by many in high stature during the early 1700s; by the time Brown forged his way to the scene, he had taken the existing styles and revolutionized them.

In Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, we see Capability Brown’s work at the Coverly estate’s Sidley Park. The grounds of Sidley Park are subject to the ever-evolving fashions of gardening throughout history. Until 1740, Hannah Jarvis states the house had a formal Italian garden, a utopia in a chaotic age—when Brown came onto the scene, the symmetry and heavy formality disappeared under his more naturalistic eye, seeing more beauty in informality. Though the audience of Arcadia never see Sidley Park, the symbolism of it is felt throughout the entirety of the play: Hannah Jarvis is averse to the landscape because she feels it only imitates the natural, and is in itself imaginarily based of paintings and Gothic literature—largely, the “pastoral.” Since we as readers are privy to the landscape’s change throughout its history, it brings into light the question of naturalness—what seems natural at first may be a crafted attempt to “seem” natural, and not “be.” Humankind is now involved, and this relationship between man and nature deepens the dichotomies of past and present, fashionable and unfashionable, natural and unnatural that Stoppard seems to be analyzing in the opening scenes of his play.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancelot_%22Capability%22_Brown>