Capability Brown & Landscape Design

In the middle years of the eighteenth century, owners of British country houses were inspired by their classical educations and by the Grand Tours that young men of means would undertake. Involving travel to Italy, the Grand Tourists returned to Britain with collections of art and a love of the classical world as depicted by artists such as Claude Lorraine

At Weston Park, Sir Henry Bridgeman and his wife, Elizabeth, Lady Bridgeman, had friends who were also interested in creating an Arcadian landscape in the British countryside. Lady Bridgeman's family home in Derbyshire was adjacent to Chatsworth and the Bridgemans were friends with the 5th Duke of Devonshire and his Duchess, the celebrated Georgiana. 

 Brown had worked on the park for the Duke's predecessor from the 1750s with the architect James Paine adding a new bridge over the River Derwent.

Capability Brown's landscapes required wealth for the large scale labour that was required. Huge quantities of earth were moved to contour the landscape, achieving the gentle curves that were so admired and to create paths and big new water features including lakes.

Weston Park's Temple Pool was created after Brown's involvement but it perfectly demonstrates the skill of the landscape gardener and the vast amounts of human labour required to fashion the pleasure grounds created in the eighteenth century

This portrait of the painter William Hogarth includes the artist's palette with the 'line of beauty'. The gentle segmental curve - exemplified in painting and sculpture - was perceived by theorists like the writer Edmund Burke as being at the source of perfect beauty. 

For Capability Brown, it informed the creation of his landscapes and can be seen in the contouring of the ground and the form of his lakes.

The ha-ha can be seen here, its sunken form allowing uninterrupted views across from pleasure ground and into the park and beyond.

Brown's landscapes are cleverly controlled. At Weston Park, his work in the 1760s involved not only the creation of the two pleasure grounds, with their walks for the family, but also the digging and building of the deep ha-has - sunken fences - which kept the deer and other livestock away from the tender plants and in the parkland that they were intended to inhabit.

Just one corner of the vast two-part walled garden that Capability Brown included on his plan for Weston Park. 

In addition to creating visions of beauty for the family and their guests to enjoy, Capability Brown was also designing a working landscape and his Weston Park work is no exception. The park was intended for stock for meat and produce, whilst north of the house his plan included a south-facing walled garden.

This was intended to provide sheltered conditions for vegetables and fruit. Even pineapples were grown within these English gardens in the fickle English climate in the eighteenth century!

These small buildings contained furnaces to raise the temperatures of the walled garden walls so that non-native produce could be grown at Weston Park.

Capability Brown's work at Weston Park is extremely well preserved and the Weston Park Foundation works to a thirty year management plan to continue to conserve this remarkable property. 

Today - over two hundred years after Capability Brown's death - the park landscape remains a place of beauty and stands testament to the vision of a remarkable landscape gardener.