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Sally Nex

Tag Archives: landscaping

A very capable man

24 Tuesday Nov 2015

Posted by sallynex in garden design, garden history, landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

18th century, capability brown, garden design, landscaping, tercentenary

capabilitybrown

© Portrait of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, c.1770-75, Cosway, Richard (1742-1821)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images

Think of the English countryside, and it’s my guess it’ll be pretty green. There will be fields, and hedgerows, and picturesque little villages nestled in valleys: perhaps a steeple peeping up above a copse of trees.

All very artistic. And not, one shred of it, natural.

Our countryside has been shaped, sculpted, created by people. Whether you live, as I do, in an ancient landscape where the fields still show the lines of old pre-enclosure strips and the hedgerows go back centuries; or whether you’re in rolling acres of emerald green, there is little left of how England was before people arrived.

So all the fuss about what Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown did to the English countryside seems a little unfair to me. He was only, after all, doing what the monks and farmers and squires had done before him, only prettier.

More of a crime to be laid at his door in my opinion is his cavalier way of erasing hundreds of years of garden history, not to mention some spectacularly beautiful formal gardens, in a supremely arrogant gesture that simply assumed people wouldn’t want that. Ever again.

The only English renaissance gardens to escape Capability’s shovels and picks were those whose owners had no truck with this modern claptrap of serpentine paths and copses and ha-has and focal points: the owners of Westbury Court, Powis Castle and Hanbury Court, we salute you.

So few have survived the Brown tsunami, and so much has been lost: I’d have loved to have seen the 17th century water gardens by de Caus (complete with joke fountains in the Italian style) and parterres which were once the glory of Wilton House in Wiltshire. But Capability saw to it that such vulgar spectacles never survived beyond the 18th century and they only exist, sketchily, on paper now.

I think part of my problem with him is that I don’t trust ‘gardeners’ who don’t do plants. Landscapers tend to talk in broad sweeps: I’m a detail person, the turn of a petal, the contrast of purple against lilac, the simple glory of an opening daisy. I don’t think Lancelot had much time for all that. And that’s why I instinctively don’t respond well to his style of doing things.

Of course, there’s no escaping Mr Brown at the moment, and it’ll get worse next year when the tercentenary starts: the 300th anniversary of his birth is as good an excuse as any to reassess his life and legacy. Carved into the hillsides of England as it is, you can’t ignore it.

Fortunately it’s to be neither a hagiography nor a hatchet job: just an honest reappraisal of the man who left us Stowe, Chatsworth, Blenheim, Alnwick, Hampton Court, Badminton… the list goes on (there are more than 250 of them).

There are to be learned conferences at Bath and Sheffield Universities, and at Hampton Court Palace (where Capability had his office) looking at everything from his management of historic gardens to his impact on the British landscape.

Lots of gardens are restoring Brown-designed chapels (Compton Verney, Warwickshire), re-envisioning Brown’s landscapes (Moccas Park, Herefordshire), or rolling back later growth to reveal Brown’s landscapes as he would have wanted them seen (Trentham Park, Staffordshire).

And already there’s lots of thought-provoking stuff out there about Brown, his legacy, his genius.

This Channel 4 programme was a real eye-opener: there’s a brilliant bit where John Phipps, who knows more about Brown than pretty much anyone, walks Alan Titchmarsh through Belvoir Castle explaining how to ‘read’ a Capability landscape.

Mr Phipps also pens a fantastic blog, The Brown Advisor: you can write in and put any question you like to him. Recent gems include ‘Where are Brown’s conkers?’ and ‘Did Brown sing in the bath?’

It all amounts to a lot of work and a lot of thinking about the man who had a longer-lasting and more profound effect on the English landscape than anyone before or since. It’s no more than he deserves: you can see his influence in everything from Prince Charles’s views on architecture to Dan Pearson’s advocacy of a sense of place in design. Like him or loathe him, there aren’t many people you can say are still making an impact 300 years after they came into the world and changed it forever.

This week in the garden…

07 Monday Jan 2013

Posted by sallynex in landscaping

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

garden design, hard work, landscaping, removing stumps, stumps

stumplong

Introducing the patient: big, ivy-wrapped, and determined to stay put

…I was digging out stumps.

Big stumps: massive ones, in fact. The kind that make you have fantasies about acquiring a large John Deere tractor at short notice equipped with towbar and strong rope. The sort that halfway through, when it’s still not budging so much as an inch, you begin to wonder whether this is the one which will defeat you and stay, stubbornly, in the ground until you can come up with a more imaginative (and probably expensive) way of getting rid of it.

Midwinter is a time I find myself doing all the grunt work in the garden: the fencing, the path laying, the reconfiguring and extending and general shifting about. Not, in fact, gardening at all.

The two stumps in question are a massive Cotoneaster horizontalis on the top terrace of our stepped garden leading from the side of the house to the garage. This has been gradually getting bigger and more thuggish ever since we’ve been here: it recently acquired a topknot of brambles and this year made the decision even easier by refusing to produce more than one or two berries, which made my previous excuse that it was helping the birds entirely redundant.

The other stump – the one in the pictures – was a large hazel bole (the multistemmed bit at the bottom when you coppice it). It wasn’t unattractive, particularly: just in entirely the wrong place, being right in front of the gate that leads into my veg garden. I’ve been eyeing it with a view to obliteration for a couple of years now. But since the extension of the veg garden by another 60ft or so is now gathering pace, the compost bins had to shift up a bit: and the hazel stump was right in their way. It had to go.

Shifting stumps involves several essential pieces of kit:

  • border spade for the fiddly bits
  • fencer’s graft: a single-cast, long-handled and narrow metal spade used by fencers to dig a straight hole. Ours has been one of the most useful tools in our armoury for years now and is rarely out of commission.
  • crowbar: another essential in the toolbox
  • bowsaw and loppers: for cutting away the surface roots (and a few underneath once you’ve got that far).

The general approach is as follows.

1: Cut away all top growth so your stump looks like a stump. Mine, being hazel, was nice and straight – next year’s wigwams, I think.

2: Gingerly dig a trench right round the stump with the border spade, cutting away surface roots as you go: anything up to an inch, with the loppers, anything larger, with the bowsaw.

3: Have a cup of coffee and congratulate yourself on making a start.

4: Start work with the fencer’s graft, deepening and widening the trench and going in as close to the actual wood of the stump as you can. At this point it helps to rope in one’s spouse, if only so you can surreptitiously take a break under the guise of chopping out a few more roots.

5: As you get deeper, start sloping in your cuts so they’re going under the stump. The idea is to destabilise the whole thing by removing all soil, cutting any anchoring wood and generally working it free. This takes absolutely ages and since by now you’re completely knackered, it’s the most painful bit of all. Added to which, the stump is still refusing to move, and your language is getting worse and worse.

stumplong2

Conquered at last. Ouch.

6: Eventually, if you keep at it long enough, the stump starts to rock, imperceptibly at first, then more and more until it is undeniably loose. This is my favourite bit of the whole process: you get a whole new injection of energy and start doing embarrassing things like punching the air and shouting, ‘Gotcha, ya b*****d!’ at an inanimate lump of wood. It is best not to let anyone observe you at this point.

7: Shove the stump over as far as you can get it and cut away the remnants of any roots holding it in place one by one, until you’ve worked it free and can roll it out of the hole.

8: Fill the hole back in, go in and brew yourself a strong coffee, and sink into a nice hot bath. Do not plan to do anything at all the following day as your muscles will be in such spasm you will be unable to move. Return to view your handiwork with that warm glow of satisfaction that comes with a job well (if painfully) done.

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