The self-trained English landscape architect and town planner Thomas Hayton Mawson became one of the most successful designers of the first decades of the twentieth century. He started his career as a nurseryman, founding the family business Mawson Brothers’ Lakeland Nurseries in Windemere in 1884. A few years later he separated the design part of the business and began to run his own consultancy. His office, Thomas H. Mawson and Sons, quickly became successful and included influential and powerful clients like Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) and William Hesketh Lever (1851–1925). They even designed gardens for royals like Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925) and King Constantine of Greece (1868–1923).