Everything in the landscapes seem to be the work of ‘nature’ but were in fact arranged by Brown - the trees, the water, the gentle shorelines, the sweeping gradients and the shrubberies in which birds and mammals shelter.
This vision of the landscape, an idea developed in England in the mid eighteenth century and which Brown espoused, has come to be thought of as ‘natural beauty’, both in its legal sense and in common usage. It is our contemporary Britain, in the countryside and in urban parkland. It is the ‘English landscape style’, so admired worldwide, replicated since the eighteenth century and still predominant in newly made landscapes today.
"The landscapes of modelled landform, sheets of water and drifts of trees, once designed as the settings for great country houses are now created not only to form the pleasaunces of entire new towns, but also to contain within the countryside such modern industrial structures as power stations, or to form the setting for reservoirs and dams" - Sylvia Crowe, 1982.