At Home - Bill Bryson [142]
His vision was sweeping. He didn’t make gardens; rather, he made landscapes. It was his habit upon seeing an estate to announce that it had capabilities, and so he acquired his famous nickname. Historians have tended to portray Brown as a mere tinkerer, an incidental improver, who did little more than arrange trees into attractive clumps. In fact, no one shifted more earth or operated on a larger scale than he did. To make the Grecian Valley at Stowe his workmen took away, in barrows, 23,500 cubic yards of soil and rock and scattered it elsewhere. At Heveningham in Suffolk he raised a large lawn by twelve feet. He happily moved fully grown trees and sometimes fully grown villages, too. To aid the former, he devised a wheeled machine that could move trees up to thirty-six feet high without harming them—a piece of horticultural engineering that was seen as almost miraculous. He planted tens of thousands of trees—ninety-one thousand in a single year at Longleat. He built lakes that covered a hundred acres of productive farmland (a fact that almost certainly gave some of his clients pause). At Blenheim Palace, a magnificent bridge crossed a piddling stream; Brown gave it a pair of lakes and made it glorious.
He saw in his mind’s eye exactly how landscapes could look a hundred years hence. Long before anyone else thought of doing so, he used native trees almost exclusively. It is such touches that make his landscapes look as if they evolved naturally when in fact they were designed almost down to the last cow pat. He was far more of an engineer and landscape architect than he was a gardener. He had a particular gift for “confusing the eye”—by, for instance, making two lakes on different levels look like a much larger single lake. Brown created landscapes that were in a sense “more English” than the countryside they replaced, and did it on a scale so sweeping and radical that it takes some effort now to imagine just how novel it was. He called it “place-making.” The landscape of much of lowland England today may look timeless, but it was in large part an eighteenth-century creation, and it was Brown more than anyone who made it. If that is tinkering, it is on a grand scale.
Brown provided a full service—design, provision of plants, planting, maintenance afterward. He worked hard and fast, and so he could manage a lot of commitments. It was said that an hour’s brisk tour of an estate was all it took for him to form a comprehensive scheme for improvements. A big part of the appeal of Brown’s approach was that it was cheap in the long run. Manicured grounds with their parterres and topiary and miles of clipped hedges needed a lot of maintenance. Brown’s landscapes looked after themselves by and large. He was also emphatically practical. Where others built temples, pagodas, and shrines, Brown put up buildings that looked like extravagant follies but actually were dairies or kennels or housing for estate workers. Having grown up on a farm, he actually understood farming and often introduced changes that improved efficiency. If not a great architect, he was certainly a competent one. For one thing, thanks to his work in landscaping, he understood drainage better than perhaps any other architect of his time. He was a master of soil engineering long before such a discipline existed. Unseen beneath his dozing landscapes can be complex drainage systems that turned bogs into meadows, and have kept them that way for 250 years. He might just as well have been called “Drainage Brown.”
Brown was once offered £1,000 to do an estate in Ireland, but he declined, saying that he hadn’t done all of England yet. In his three decades of self-employment, he undertook