Jane Brown, who has died aged 87, once described her relationship with garden history as that of “a spectator, only occasionally drawn into the fray”, but to anyone who has read her books this seems almost laughably modest. Brown led a resurgence of interest from the 1980s onwards in figures such as Sir Edwin Lutyens, Gertrude Jekyll and the American landscape architect Lanning Roper from the earlier part of the century, and she deserves at least some of the credit for the growing enthusiasm for garden history during the past 50 years, both as an academic discipline and as an area of interest to garden designers and casual garden visitors alike.
What was groundbreaking about her approach, however, was the determination to avoid what she called the “overly aristocratic” approach to garden history, which she felt made it seem “as if only the great and the good had gardens”. In the foreword to her book The Pursuit of Paradise (1999), she declared it was an attempt “to redress the balance, to outline a history of gardens that is also popular and nostalgic”.
