Capability’ Brown, born as Lancelot Brown, designed over 170 parks surrounding the finest country houses and estates in Britain, many of which still endure. At Stowe in Buckinghamshire he served under William Kent, one of the founders of the new English style of landscape gardening.

He was called “Capability” Brown because he told his clients that their estates had great “capability” for landscape improvements. His style of smooth undulating grass, which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers, were a new style within the English landscape, a “gardenless” form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles.

His works include the EGHN gardens Trentham Estate in Staffordshire, Claremont and Gatton Park in Surrey as well as Blenheim, Chatsworth, Hampton Court, Kew Gardens, Prior Park and many others.