Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was an English landscape gardener who lived in the mid-Georgian period and was notorious for creating fake wilderness’ by moving hills, damming rivers and flooding small valleys.
He earned his nickname ‘Capability’ because he would tell his clients that their estates had great “capability” for landscape improvement. Generally this improvement would involve ripping out old formal gardens and replacing them with smooth, bland acres of undulating grass and serpentine lakes.
In fact Brown was so fond of landscape improvement that Richard Owen Cambridge once quipped that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could “see heaven before it was improved.”
