Thomas John Caparn was an artist, businessman, and horticulturalist who owned the largest nursery in the English Midlands. He left England in 1884 and settled in Short Hills, New Jersey, where he built a partnership designing gardens with his younger son, Arthur Tom Caparn, a nurseryman. By 1899, he had opened a landscape architecture office in Newark, New Jersey. His son Harold A. Caparn also became an accomplished landscape designer in the United States. In his artwork, Thomas painted botanical subjects and landscapes.