Capability Brown and the Best English Landscape Parks
The English landscape park, developed in the eighteenth century by William Kent, Capability Brown, Humphry Repton and their patrons, is one of England's most influential cultural exports. The smooth grass, serpentine water, clumped woodland and ha-ha-concealed cattle of the form became the international image of pastoral nature.
Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire
Brown's most ambitious park (commissioned 1763), with the Grand Lake created by damming the Glyme. Vanbrugh's bridge sits drowned to the second arch — Brown's improvement.
Stowe, Buckinghamshire
Begun by Charles Bridgeman, then handed to Kent and finally Brown, Stowe is the most iconographically complex English landscape, with over 40 temples, monuments and follies.
Stourhead, Wiltshire
Henry Hoare II's Arcadian landscape (1741) is not strictly a Brown park but defines the same period at its most consciously pictorial.
Petworth, West Sussex
Brown's only park to keep the original deer in significant numbers — over 700 fallow deer still roam the 700-acre park.
Chatsworth, Derbyshire
Brown's park beyond the formal Cascade survives intact: serpentine river, clumps of beech, the ha-ha at the edge of the lawn.
Sheffield Park, East Sussex
Brown's park reworked by James Pulham and Arthur Soames in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, now famous for its autumn colour around the four lakes.
Holkham Hall, Norfolk
William Kent's park (designed 1734) is one of the earliest fully landscape compositions in England, with the obelisk axis and Triumphal Arch.
Bowood, Wiltshire
Brown's park with one of his finest lakes, and Robert Adam's mausoleum as the focal point.
Wimpole Hall, Cambridgeshire
Successive contributions by Bridgeman, Brown and Repton — perhaps the best place to see English landscape style evolve on one site.
Audley End, Essex
Brown's late commission (1763) for the Earl of Suffolk, with the river Cam dammed to create a long lake reflecting the Jacobean house.
Keep exploring
All of the gardens mentioned in this article are pinned on the interactive map. Use it to plan a route, group nearby sites into a single trip, or compare gardens by style and season.