Stephen Switzer

Stephen Switzer (1682–1745) was an English gardener, garden designer and writer on garden subjects, often credited as an early exponent of the English landscape garden. He is most notable for his views of the transition between the large garden, still very formal in his writings, and the surrounding countryside, especially woodland.

He himself called his intended style the "Natural and Rural way of Gardens",^[1] and a modern garden historian has termed it the "English Forest Style", turning sites such as Wray Wood behind Castle Howard into "a network of meandering walks creating a sort of labyrinth woodland".^[2] But his main work on the subject, Ichnographica Rustica, or The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener's recreation (1715–18) came rather too early for the flood of new American trees and shrubs that led to the development of the shrubbery a generation later, and subsequently the woodland garden, and Switzer's schemes for the more distant parts of sites from the house seem to have firmly remained woodland rather than garden. Like many later gardening writers, his views are often expressed with more intemperate fervour than clarity.

Although he had never travelled abroad to see them,^[3] Switzer admired and emulated the formal grandeur of French broad prospects and woodland avenues, finding in the state of horticulture an index of cultural health, in Augustan Rome as in contemporary Britain, where August Designs [his example is Blenheim Palace], denote that Greatness of Mind that reigns in the English Nobility and Gentry".^[4]

His landscape design principles parallel those expressed in Alexander Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington and the views on "natural" gardening expressed in essays by Joseph Addison, but his rejection of formality was perhaps rather limited by later standards. The contrast between the text and the illustrations in the Ichnographica, which show highly formal gardens with fearsomely high and straight clipped hedges, "has puzzled historians for many years", and perhaps results from a lack of communication with the illustrator, or a loss of nerve.^[5]