Lancelot Brown is popularly viewed as an innovative genius who invented a new kind of 'naturalistic' setting for the residences of the rich. He swept away gardens enclosed by walls and hedges, avenues, and all forms of geometric planting, and in their place he created 'landscape parks' , comprising wide prospects of turf, irregularly scattered with trees and clumps of woodland, and surrounded in whole or part by a perimeter woodland belt. The boundary between the mown lawns around the house,

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... this wider parkland landscape, was dissolved by the use of the sunken fence or ha-ha and, wherever topography and money permitted, a lake of serpentine or irregular form would be placed in the middle distance of the view from the windows. 2 As most readers will be well aware, of course, we must be careful not to exaggerate the extent to which all this was new. Purely geometric styles of garden design had, in fact, been in retreat for many decades before Brown began his career as an independent designer in 1749. 3 Through the 1720s Charles Bridgeman and others had created simplified geometric landscapes which already, at some places, included lakes of irregular form. In the 1730s William Kent designed serpentine gardens as distinct spaces within such simplified formal frameworks, ornamented with classical buildings and scattered clumps, at Holkham, Stowe, and elsewhere. 4 During the 1740s and 1750s these gardens in turn became progressively more cluttered, both with elaborate and often exotic planting, and with a whole host of weird and wonderful structures -Chinese temples, gothic ruins, mosques, Turkish tents -to create what some historians refer to as the 'rococo garden' . 5 As early as 1739, the year that Brown moved south from Northumberland, one contributor to The World lampooned the contemporary obsession with 'moving earth' , and the way that 'a Serpentine River and a Wood are become the absolute Necessities of Life, without which a gentleman of the smallest fortune thinks he makes no Figure in the country' . 6 1 Although written by the author, this chapter draws heavily on the innovative and important research of David Brown. 2 Stroud, D. (1950). Capability Brown; Hyams, E. (1971). Capability Brown and Humphry Repton. London: Dent; Hinde, T. (1986) Capability Brown: The story of a master gardener. London: Norton and Co; Brown, J. (2011). The omnipotent magician, Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. London: Chatto and Windus; Mayer, L. (2011). Capability Brown and the English landscape garden.