By general consensus, the English are good at two things: writing and gardening. This year, and thanks to the double-your-money principle that allows us to celebrate birth- and deathdays equally and in succession, England’s most famous writer, William Shakespeare (1564?–1616), and her most famous gardener, Lancelot “Capability” Brown (1716–1783), are enjoying centennial festivities.

You wouldn’t always think to compare them. Forced, though, into juxtaposition by this accident of dates, some common characteristics emerge. Both were men from modest backgrounds, professionals in a medium where aristocratic practice had set the standard. Each arrived upon an artistic milieu which still looked to Italy and the classical world for validation and ideas and built on its foundations a model of vernacular self-sufficiency. Both are biographically elusive: documentation for Brown is of course more abundant than for the almost-invisible Shakespeare, yet curiously sparse for a celebrity in the age of letters. Unlike Humphry Repton, his chief successor in the landscape movement, Brown left no treatises or even letters to explain his aesthetic principles; his biographers have had to manage on a few reported scraps. Furthermore, because the effect of Brown’s achievement has been to retrain our collective native eye to read his art as simple “nature,” and see nature in terms of his art, his work has melted into England’s landscape as Shakespeare into its language.

Of all the art forms to arise from these developments, none cast a more faithful reflection than gardening.

The hundred years from