In celebration of his 300th year, a definitive survey of Capability Brown's most famous gardens and landscapes in Britain. Widely acknowledged as the most influential landscape designer of his age, Lancelot Capability Brown was to England what Frederick Law Olmsted was to America--responsible for shaping the very ideal of the nation's parkland. Brown's ambition was to bring out of a landscape the best of its potential rather than impose his own ideas upon it. His designs are organic, weaving gestures of color and perspective into the features that the country already afforded. So natural are his designs, and so perfectly do they complement the houses within them ..

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716-1783) is the iconic figure at the head of the English landscape style, a tradition that has dominated landscape design in the western world. He was widely acclaimed for his genius in his own day and his influence on the culture of England has arguably been as great as that of Turner, Telford and Wordsworth. This book for the first time looks at the motivation behind Brown's landscapes and questions their value and structure whilst at the same time placing him within the English landscape tradition. It aims primarily to make landscape legible, to show people where to stand, what to look at and how to see. br ..

A definitive survey of the glorious British landscapes designed by Humphry Repton, whose influence is felt everywhere from the rolling meadows and kitchen gardens of English estates to New York City's Central Park. br Widely acknowledged as the last great landscape designer of the eighteenth century, Humphry Repton created work that survives as a bridge between the picturesque theory of Capability Brown and the pastoral philosophy of Frederick Law Olmsted. By turns inspired by and in opposition to the grandeur of Brown's estates, Repton's contribution to the British landscape encompassed a tremendous range, from subtle adjustments that emphasized the natura ..