Bring grass up to the walls of the house and keep the cattle off it with a ha-ha; plant trees in clumps on the rising ground and as single specimens on the lawn; and enclose the park with a belt of woodland, with a drive inside it from which the park is seen.
Brown wrote no book, and his rules must be read from his parks and from Thomas Whately, who described their parts in 1770. Whately distinguishes the clump, a small group of trees standing in the open; the grove; and the wood. A clump should have an irregular outline and trees of different heights, so that it reads as a natural group; Brown placed his on the brows of slopes, where they make the ground seem higher, and often planted them with a fence round them until the young trees were safe from cattle. The belt is a wide band of woodland round the boundary, which hides the edge of the property and the farmland beyond, so that the park seems to have no end; a drive inside it shows the park in a sequence of views.
Brown’s trees were oak, beech, elm and sweet chestnut, with Scots pine and larch as nurses to be thinned later, and cedars of Lebanon near the house. His few remarks on his method survive at second hand. Hannah More reported in 1782 that he compared it to writing: here he made a comma, there a colon, elsewhere a parenthesis to break the view, and then a full stop before beginning another subject.
The critics of the 1790s attacked exactly these elements as formulas: Price called the clump a bald and formal thing, and Repton too came to criticise the belt as a monotonous ring.
In place of a wall, bound the garden with a ditch whose side towards the garden is a vertical retaining wall and whose other side slopes up to the field, so that cattle are kept out and the view from the house runs on uninterrupted into the park.
ditch c. 1.5–2 m deep: wall on the garden side, turf slope on the park side
Let the character of the site direct the design: whether the ground should be raised or lowered, a view opened or closed, water led or stilled. Prefer variety, surprise and concealed bounds to symmetry.
Compose the garden as a painter composes a landscape: in groups of trees for light and shade, with water winding through the hollows and a temple or bridge placed where it will be seen across it, so that each turn of the walk opens a new picture.
Make the lake by damming a stream in its valley, give it a winding, irregular outline with promontories, and hide both its ends behind trees, a bend or a bridge, so that it seems a river flowing through the park.
Show the natural beauties of a place and hide its defects; give it an appearance of extent and freedom by disguising the boundary; conceal every interference of art, so that the whole seems natural; and remove or hide whatever serves only convenience and cannot be made ornamental.
Let the approach be the natural road to the house, without needless turns; let it show the house first at an angle, so that two sides are seen, and not head-on down an avenue; and make it plain that the road leads to this house and nowhere else.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Lawn to the door, clumps on the rises, a belt round the edge”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/brown-lawn-and-clumps. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.