The spoil heap at Wentworth Castle
Days come in late March or in April, when Spring has not wholly disentangled herself from Winter, but there is a freshness to the air and it is better to be out than to be in. So I am advised by the good folk of Health and Safety , who have asked me to warn you that happiness can cause damage in confined spaces.
In my last (note 213), I offered to my companions at the Tatler’s Waste-bin a list of all those landscapes of that fine man and lord-lieutenant of Huntingdon, Capability Brown, for which I had records of an active deer park.
Spring brings out the cynic in men like Captain Ken – it is the sudden and unpredictable change in the look of things. Mr Honey on the other hand grows steadily less repressible. ‘Hark at the lark!’ he is wont to say, at every chirrup from a passing sparrow.
The Bowood Cascade
John Dalrymple: `The rapidity and noise of the rivers should be increased by artificial bulwarks and impediments .. and the falls of water should, by the interposition of rocks, or of new streams brought over them, be made to look more like cataracts than cascades…’
The cascade at Ugbrooke
William Marshall’s encomium takes us to the heartwood: ‘we know of no shrub or tree whatever, the Oak, the Ash, the Elm, and the Beech excepted, so deserving of the planter’s notice as the Box.
Robinia pseudacacia was heralded by William Cobbett as the new, quicker growing oak, yet actually the Rev William Gilpin already knew it to be a brittle wood, and ‘besides, tho a shattered tree may grace a forest; yet, in an adorned scene, it disgusts.’
Finding myself at liberty in North Yorkshire, I took a stroll through the delightful grounds of Scampston where I found myself in company with the equally delightful Mrs H of Richmond who asked me how Brown managed to instruct his foremen, and how he knew how much to pay them.
In Nicholson’s painting, the grassy bank on the near side of the cascade at Scampston is dished, apparently to show off the water
Mrs F has contacted me from Kenilworth to ask whether Capability Brown designed menageries.
Mr. M. from Heathfield is puzzling over Scale’s survey of Sheffield Place in 1774,
In Dublin, as it were, the other day I got to speaking with a well-belled man, let us call him Mr S,
The Brown Advisor©2015
By John Phibbs