Lancelot Brown was born in Kirkharle, where a plaque in St Eilfrid's church commemorates his baptism. Over the next six decades this child was to transform the estates of nearly two hundred of the country's leading families and establish a style of landscaping which has permanently altered our views on the relation between the natural and the artificial.
The rigidly formal geometrical French gardens of the previous century with their gravel paths, canals, clipped hedges and statuary had proclaimed the difference between nature tamed by man and the wilderness beyond the estate wall. With Brown, these restraints disappeared; in their place he provided sweeping landscapes of trees, lawns and serpentine lakes that looked like rivers. Here the nobility could ride and rive and feel free and at ease in their possessions. The wilderness beyond was masked by Brown's cunningly informal clumps of woodland, designed to provide seasonal colour. This style of landscaping became known as le jardin anglais and took England and the continent by storm.
Lancelot Brown was the fifth child of six, but the records are far from clear. There is no mention of his father William's marriage to his mother, and nowhere is his mother's Christian name given. It is also rather surprising that a boy of Lancelot's social position should have stayed at school till he was sixteen. Those who feel that genius is unlikely to spring from a lowly family like the Browns (or Shakespeares) have proposed that Lancelot was in fact the illegitimate son of Sir Walter Loraine - according to local traditions, his mother was a servant at the Hall. As soon as Brown left school, he went to work for the Loraine family at Kirkharle Tower. In 1739, he left Northumberland, most likely with an introduction to Lady Loraine's family in Buckinghamshire.
From 1740 Brown worked on William Kent's astonishing layout at Stowe Park, Bucks, where he invented a greatly-improved tree-moving machine. He was also 'loaned out' and became a consulting landscape gardener. By this time he had married Bridget Wayet from 'a very respectable Lincolnshire family.' In 1750, Brown wrote to George Bowes at Gibside, County Durham, proposing himself as the architect of the monumental column Bowes wished to build: 'I should have a double pleasure in [building] it your situation being my native country.'
From now on, Brown's influence was felt in virtually every part of the country. The list of great properties where his hand was involved is almost endless: Petworth; Bowood; Burghley; Blenheim; Harewood; Chatsworth; Longleat and the Duke of Northumberland's Alnwick Castle and Syon House. He turned to architecture too - the house was after all the chief focus of his gardens - and designed Croome Court in Warwickshire in 1751. His fame was immense and he was on terms with many of the nobility. His nickname is supposed to derive from his habit of assuring patrons that their estates had 'great capabilities' , but it also suggests the tireless man himself. Portraits show him as having a shrewd countryman's face with keenly twinkling eyes and a generous humorous mouth.
In 1764 Brown reached the position he had dreamed of when George III appointed him Master Gardener at Hampton Court with a handsome salary. It was Brown who planted the great vine there. Though Brown worked on Rothley Lake near Wallington Hall, he was not allowed to touch Wallington itself, according to Sir George Otto Trevelyan , 'for fear of his doctoring and deforming the natural features of the ground.' Brown's work, however, can be seen in the North East at Hesleyside and in the deliciously landscaped grounds of Alnwick Castle, designed to go with the gothick fantasy which the first Duke of Northumberland was making out of the mediaeval castle to please his wife ('junketaceous' according to Horace Walpole) in about 1765. Walpole wrote c 1767:

Born to grace nature and her works complete
With all that's beautiful, sublime and great!
For him each muse enwreathes the laurel crown
And consecrates to fame immortal Brown.