Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia offers two contrasting views on a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at the imagined Sidley Park.
Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia offers two contrasting views on a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape at the imagined Sidley Park. Lady Croom, the 19th-century owner, praises its harmonious natural style, even down to ‘the right amount of sheep tastefully arranged’. Two hundred years later, a garden historian laments the destruction of the ‘sublime geometry’ of 17th-century formal gardens: ‘paradise in the age of reason’, before being ‘ploughed under by Capability Brown’. It is not even English, Hannah Jarvis complains:
English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors … Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil.
The fact that ‘Capability’ Brown is still celebrated and satirised today proves his impact on our ideas of what a garden should be. For many country estates, a ‘Capability’ Brown landscape remains a prime attraction, yet the man who created them is in many ways elusive.
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