Research on 179 parks and gardens created by celebrated landscape designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown has now been made available to the public at www.parksandgardens.org, thanks to painstaking work by volunteer researchers from the County Gardens Trusts.
Parks & Gardens UK (PGUK) is a free unique free online resource that captures information on historic parks and gardens across the UK and is the first port of call for garden fans wanting to know more about the history of sites near them.
This work has been undertaken as part of a national celebration in 2016 of the 300th birthday of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.
Although his name is well recognised, beyond devoted experts most people know very little about this great man and his work.
The Brownian style is easy to recognise, and he left behind some of his business's account books which had helped to identify which parts of our countryside have actually been the work of his hand.
Yet until 2016 much of this investigation had stopped at a matching of his name with a site, or a hunch that he may have worked somewhere.
This year however, an army of volunteer researchers at Gardens Trusts across the country has been deployed to search through dusty archives and tramp across muddy parkland to get to the bottom of exactly what this great man achieved.
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