Roger Wilsher

This book was is sadly uninspiring. The author gives none of the excitement of this man - the original landscape gardener. It offers nothing in the way of the insights and understanding of Repton, who brought together his skills as a watercolour painter and his personal experience of designing landscapes. He was the first to use the term, landscape gardener but this book fails to reveal what it was about the work that made him both the best and the worst of landscape gardeners of the period. The best of his characteristics were as artist, designer and natural successor to Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. Some of the worst were in his writing, which was once described as ‘a devastating mixture of servile pomposity’. Elizabeth Cairns has singularly failed to bring the man and his art to life in this workaday volume.