THIS Year marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Lancelot "Capability" Brown, the famous landscape designer whose name is forever connected with Croome Court in Worcestershire.

To mark the special occasion, the Embroiders' Guild will stage an exhibition at The Artrix in Bromsgrove, from September 2 to September 25.

A spokesman said it will be "an opportunity to see a display of unique and specially created textile work based around the typically English scene of landscapes and stately gardens".

It is perhaps fair to say that without Croome Court, Lancelot Brown might not have been considered so capable. It was, in fact, his first big break.

Brown had enjoyed aristocratic commissions before George, the 6th Earl of Coventry set him to task to transform the grounds of Croome Court, in 1751, when the ambitious landscape artist was a sprightly 35.

But Croome Court, near Pershore, was his first completed large landscape, and it is also a masterpiece, according to the National Trust - which, in its information on the site, describes it as "Capability' Brown's very first".

The Trust has spent more than 17 years restoring the parkland and this year will see the planting of 500 trees, precisely where Brown wanted them to be.

Many trees, cedars in particular, have vanished since his day; but the re-planting programme is using GPS technology and original 18th century maps to make sure that each replanted tree goes exactly where it should go.

Brown in Worcestershire was a long way from home. He was a Northamptonshire lad, the son of farmer.

His first job was as a gardener's boy on the Kirkharle estate, near his home.

But by 1741, at the youthful age of 25, he was already head gardener at Stowe.

He also started designing; and early designs can be seen at Charlecote in Oxfordshire and at Warwick Castle.

However, Croome was Brown’s first large-scale commission.

It seems he was given virtual carte blanche to do as he pleased - but why was his work in so much demand?

The answer is a change in the national mindset, at least among the aristocratic.

Earlier English grandees had praised order and decorum: the kind of order and decorum which one may see in an Elizabethan knot garden, for instance, where all is trimmed and controlled, from the hedges to the roses, in a wilful triumph of Mankind over nature.

Brown, on the other hand, was working at the very dawn of the Romantic era in England.

A few decades on, the Romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge would be praising the sublime in nature, such as mountains and waterfalls. Until then, nature had largely been viewed as something to be subdued with a nervous shudder.

The wealthy of Brown's day, in short, wanted to view the Romantic sublime from their Palladian windows, or at least a facsimile of those wilder, rambling landscapes.

At Croome, Brown set to work draining away marshes and he even moved the nearly village away from the house, where it could be hidden by trees.

The medieval church was replaced with a more Gothic design, and he had a new lake dug out by land, and also a bogus stretch of river, - and all to add to the picturesque effect.

For a man intent on emulating nature, then, he was in fact still attempting to improve on it.

The Earl, of course, was grateful; and genius such as Brown possessed, to follow an individual vision, was very much in fashion. It was the way of the age.

When Brown died in 1783, aged 67, the Earl set up a memorial beside the lake at Croome.

The inscription reads: “To the memory of Lancelot Brown, who by the powers of his inimitable and creative genius, formed this garden out of a morass."