Humphry Repton
Humphry Repton (21 April 1752 – 24 March 1818) was the last great designer of the classic phase of the English landscape garden, often regarded as the successor to Capability Brown.
In 1788, aged 36 and with four children and no secure income, he hit on the idea of combining his sketching skills with his limited experience of laying out grounds at Sustead to become a 'landscape gardener' (a term he himself coined).
Since the death of Capability Brown in 1783, no one figure dominated English garden design; Repton was ambitious to fill this gap and sent circulars round his contacts in the upper classes advertising his services.
He was at first an avid defender of Brown's views, contrasted with those of Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, but later adopted a moderate position.
That Repton, with no real experience of practical horticulture, became an overnight success, is a tribute to his undeniable talent, but also to the unique way he presented his work.
To help clients visualise his designs, Repton produced 'Red Books' (so called for their binding) with explanatory text and watercolours with a system of overlays to show 'before' and 'after' views.
Brown worked for many of the wealthiest aristocrats in Britain, carving huge landscape parks out of old formal gardens and agricultural land.
On these smaller estates, where Brown would have surrounded the park with a continuous perimeter belt, Repton cut vistas through to 'borrowed' items such as church towers, making them seem part of the designed landscape (coincidentally a concept common in East Asian gardening).
In 1792 Page employed Humphry Repton, by then famous as a landscape architect, to convert the previous farmland into wooded parkland and to make improvements to the house.
It included the southern slopes of Barn Hill to the north, where Repton planted trees and started building a 'prospect house' – a Gothic tower offering a view over the parkland.
By contrast, Repton acted as a consultant, charging for his Red Books and sometimes staking out the ground, but leaving his client to arrange the actual execution.
In 1794 Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price simultaneously published vicious attacks on the 'meagre genius of the bare and bald', criticising his smooth, serpentine curves as bland and unnatural and championing rugged and intricate designs, composed according to 'picturesque' principles of landscape painting.
Repton re-introduced formal terraces, balustrades, trellis work and flower gardens around the house in a way that became common practice in the nineteenth century.
The gardens were restored with the additional help of archaeological investigation and archive photographs, to the original plans and are now listed as Grade II by Historic England.
[10] In addition to his innovations in landscape architecture, Repton's 1803 quote "the thorn is the mother of the oak" has become a tenet of rewilding, where thorny plants are used to protect young native saplings from overbrowsing by rabbits and deer.
