Now that world travel is once again a reasonable (and possible) pastime, you might decide to visit as exotic a location as you could find. Or even one that might be pretty hard to find — like, for example, East Timor.
Timor is an island at the southern end of the island chains in southeast Asia. Across the Timor Sea to the south is Australia, and if you go straight east you’ll eventually get to New Guinea. The island is politically separated into West Timor (part of Indonesia) and East Timor (an independent country since 1999).
East Timor is considered part of Asia, and it’s the only country in Asia that’s completely in the southern hemisphere. You’d be able to get around most of the country if you visited — at least language-wise. English is pretty common there. But if you speak Portuguese or Tetum, that would be even better. Tetum is one of the native languages, and the place was a Portuguese trading post from the 1700s until 1975, which is where the Portuguese came from.
In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, and the occupation lasted until 1999. The UN got involved, and that’s why we’re having this lengthy consultation about East Timor today. It was August 30, 1999, that the UN supervised a referendum, and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of independence. That’s commemorated in East Timor by the holiday they’re celebrating today. It might be one of the oddest-named holidays, though; it’s “Popular Consultation Day.” Because the population was consulted.
The population of England has never been consulted about English gardens; for centuries they’ve been the work of the upper crust. If you had a castle, or a palace, or a country estate, you’d have the grounds designed according to the style of the era. In the 1600s the style was formal, and probably included some fake ruins. There might even be a hermit living somewhere in what looked like an ancient Roman hovel — the nobles would hire people to pretend to be hermits, just to provide the right atmosphere. By about 1750, though, you would have had the grounds around your country manor redone to look more natural — it still wasn’t actually natural, but it was supposed to look like a theoretically natural scene raised up to perfection.
The guy you wanted to hire to redo your landscape was Capability Brown. He was the kind of person that might not exist anywhere else but England: a celebrity gardener. The job is called “landscape architect” now, but I don’t think there are any landscape architects as famous as Brown was in the 1760s, when he was earning the equivalent of about $1.5 million per year from commissions to redesign the grounds of places like Blenheim Palace and Warwick Castle.
Many of the “gardens” he designed are still there, and if you decided to travel to England instead of East Timor, you could visit them today in honor of Capability Brown’s birthday. His real name was Lancelot, though. He got the nickname because when a new client brought him out to have a look at their estate, he’d invariably tell them that their land “had the capability for improvement.”
