Capability Brown – the original networker

“Since our lives are short, let us leave something behind to show we have lived”  

– Pliny (on a memorial to Capability Brown at Stowe Gardens)

Networker and Gardener

It may have escaped your attention that this year marks not only the Golden Jubilee, but also the 300th anniversary of the landscape designer Capability Brown, so named for telling all his potential clients that their gardens had ‘capabilities’. 

However, Brown was  as much an excellent networker in business as he was an ‘ominpotent magician’ in the garden design world.

His combination of business acumen and technical ability led to him securing all the prime commissions (Blenheim, Stowe, Chatsworth, Harewood) and an eventual royal appointment in 1764. However, this success did not go unnoticed by his rivals, one of whom wrote that he hoped to die before Brown could get to heaven and improve it!

Brown’s Business Model

Brown was incredibly hard-working, but was also ahead of his time in the way he approached landscape gardening as a serious business, rather than a leisure activity – we could all learn something from his approach:

• Sales Ladder – Brown never turned a commission down; he charged for a site survey, then for a visit, then for a design….and so on until for tens of thousands of pounds you had his undivided attention
• Business Planning – he divided the country into quarters, and crossed it by horseback, scheduling appointments in advance along the way
• Networking – he regularly dined with Dukes and had frequent audiences with the King, which meant that the cachet of Capability Brown garden became immense

The Literary Gardener

Probably what endears me most to Capability Brown is how he viewed the art of garden design in terms of writing when striving to achieve an effect as close to nature as possible.

‘I make a comma, and there’ pointing to another spot, ‘where a more decided turn is proper, I make a colon; at another part, where an interruption is desirable to break the view, a parenthesis; now a full stop, and then I begin another subject'”