Steffie Shields - Moving Heaven and Earth: Capability Browns Gift of Landscape

E veryone has landscapes lodged in their memories, many from childhood.

I remember my first real urge to take a photograph. I was eight years old, visiting the Dutch tulip fields of Keukenhof. Such glorious settings have the power to evoke deep emotions or, simply, take the breath away. Whatever the view, we all see things differently from each other. We see with memory.

My father once told me he found it difficult to appreciate landscape. Such was his training as a gunner in WWII that any time he surveyed a beautiful scene, sadly, his eyes saw only possible gun emplacements. His compensation was that he delighted in writing verse, and would read to me from this memory bank, or snippets of his favourite poets, especially Robert Frost. Some lines have never left me.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

My different journey began in Hampshire, at Broadlands. I ignored the classical charm of the house as a sweeping lawn led me down to the edge of the meandering River Test. A pair of swans piloted their cygnets under leaning white willows. A spreading copper beech attracted attention at the river bend, great trees punctuated the water meadow, and upstream a stand of Scots pines dominated the river bank. All seemed serene, reassuring. Nothing disturbed the eye or the peace.

I fell under the spell of the place, and later discovered that this pastoral setting had been to a great extent man-made by the celebrated Capability Brown.

Five years passed. I had given up teaching to bring up a family, and taken up garden photography, a passion kindled by two years of living in California sunshine and later properly stoked by the trail-blazing photography of Andrew Lawson.

My husband, an officer in the Royal Air Force, was posted to a radar station on the east coast of Northumberland, and we moved there with our young daughter. In October 1987, as I dashed to catch my train to Newcastle, the great hurricane devastated vast tracts of land in the south of the country, and uprooted millions of trees, a loss that greatly affected me it was almost as bad as losing ones friends.