Capability Brown at Knowsley Hall
In 2016, across England, a series of events – including exhibitions, conferences and guided walks, supported by a number of significant publications – were held to mark the tercentenary of the birth of one of our most famous gardeners and influential landscape architects: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716-83). Born in the village of Kirkhale in Northumberland, from 1741 Brown trained under the influential designer William Kent at Lord Cobham’s renowned gardens and immense park at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, where Brown soon became head gardener. His redesigned landscape settings for Warwick Castle and Blenheim Palace are especially memorable. However, these are only three among 170 gardens and parks that Brown remodelled across England and Wales, many of which survive to this day. In 1764 he was appointed by King George III as Master Gardener at Hampton Court Palace. After his death, Brown’s style of landscape design went out of fashion during the Romantic period and throughout the nineteenth century. However, his reputation has continued to recover since the end of the Second World War, as many of his landscapes – with their sweeping curves, lakes and bridges – have been recovered and restored.
The evidence for Brown working at Knowsley during the second half of the 1770s is to be found in his manuscript account book, which is preserved in the Lindley Library at the Royal Horticultural Society, London. Brown notes with respect to the 11th Earl, and his son Lord Strange, the future 12th Earl:
‘The Earl of Derby by order of Lord Strange to Knowsley in Lancashire.
N.B. wrote Lord Strange and my journey would be near or one hundred pounds.
A General Plan for the alteration of this Place. In July 1775 Received on this Account £100.0.0 1776 August.
Since the above one journey to Knowsley the Plan for the New Kitchen Garden & for the Alteration of the Grounds round the House.
£84.0.0 May 1780 Received in full L.B.’
This precious archival document reveals that Brown had been commissioned by Lord Strange to make the journey from London to Knowsley in 1775, in order to produce a plan for remodelling the Park. The following year Brown provided a plan for a new walled kitchen garden as well as for the grounds or gardens immediately around the Hall. Unfortunately, no plans or correspondence have survived, thus depriving us as to what Brown intended exactly for his new designs of the park, kitchen garden and pleasure grounds. The sums spent by the earl on Brown’s plans were quite substantial, which indicates how seriously both patron and designer treated this project.
Further important evidence for Brown’s work at Knowsley can be found in a remarkable volume of sketches – ‘Views of Knowsley’ – made in 1780 and during the following years by Louis B. Pasquier, the valet to the 12th Earl. While the new kitchen garden is not depicted among these fascinating amateur drawings and watercolours, the ‘Mizzie Pond’ (now ‘Mizzie Dam’) and the ‘Great Water’ (now known as ‘White Man’s Dam’) are neatly delineated. However, it is unclear to what degree Brown planned the enlargement of these expanses of water in the park. Nonetheless, Pasquier’s drawings of the grounds and gardens around the southern and eastern sides of the Hall are revealing of the new planting of young trees and bushes (known as ‘shrubberies’), which are known to be typical of Brown’s designs for pleasure gardens in close proximity to country houses. These plantings featured serpentine paths and neat borders that often lead up to architectural eye-catchers, such as the Octagon (built two decades earlier in 1755) and the dairy, which had been designed by Robert Adam in the 1770s (demolished in the 1950s).
Despite the inevitable changes to the landscape and gardens made over the last two and a half centuries, it has been possible to identify a number of trees that were probably planted on Brown’s advice. Particularly exciting was the confirmation that the large London plane tree on the southern side of the Hall by Eagle Tower was most probably planted around 1775-80. The walls of the large kitchen garden with their distinctive triangular buttresses are highly distinctive of Brown’s designs for such structures. Research is ongoing to uncover the imprint of Capability Brown’s work at Knowsley, though the clues can clearly be seen in the landscape, tree-planting and kitchen garden.
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