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A Sustainable Style Legacy

A Sustainable Style Legacy

By Steven Willis on 23rd June, 2010

Sustainable gardening is one of the best ways to follow an environmentally-friendly lifestyle. However, the aim of making the garden look natural isn't a modern concept.

England's most famous historical landscape gardener, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, was one of the great proponents of natural garden style and did much to develop and promote the approach throughout the country in the 18th century. Known as 'Capability' because of his tendency to discuss the 'capabilities' of a garden prior to working on it, Brown personally designed and developed some 170 gardens and parks, shaping the thinking of garden designers and landscape architects to this day.

Prior to Brown's landscaping style gaining national acclaim and influence in the mid 1700's, formal gardens in country estates tended to be heavily patterned, laid out in stark geometric shapes and containing vivid focal points such as statues and other structures, often painted in bright colours specifically to stand out. Brown's approach dispensed with the brashness and openly 'manmade' aesthetic of this design style and introduced a deliberately natural appearance that mimicked organic forms and layouts.

Brown achieved his natural visual style by manipulating the positioning of waterways and lakes, copses of trees and layered lawns, which combined to create the impression of an untouched landscape. The premise of the approach was that nature provided the ultimate 'design' aesthetic, and as such any developed garden should follow its lead.

In fact, the majority of criticism levelled at Capability Brown's design style - during and after his lifetime - targeted this as an emphatic negative, as it was such a departure from the previously accepted approach and appeared so virtually indistinguishable from nature as to look undeveloped. So, in a roundabout way, the controversy caused by Brown's nature-driven style somewhat underlined the success of his methods.

While your own sustainable garden visions of course don't have to match the sweeping landscapes of Capability Brown, it's reassuring to note that every time you use a native tree species or aim for a natural style in your own garden, you're following the same approach of one of the greatest and most beloved landscape architects in history.


Category:  Garden Designs

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