Towering above the rest of the professional practitioners of landscaping, in terms both of genius and industry, were two remarkable men, Capability Brown and his successor Humphry Repton. Both transformed many thousands of acres of England and Wales from “natural’ into ‘picturesque’ landscape; both were gifted architects of beautiful houses; both, in the course of their work, met many of the leading men of their day, and George III made a friend of Brown; both, in their different ways, exerted a lasting influence on other landscape designers, including those of America and Europe. Edward Hyams, himself a gardener of sophistication and taste, has written in this book an account of the astonishingly full lives of two men to whom Britain is indebted for the pleasing, apparently artless, aspect of its greatest gardens. It is a volume to delight every garden lover and every reader who finds pleasure in biography and the narrative of two lives creatively and richly lived. With nearly 50 illlustrations/photographs