Stephen Switzer


Stephen Switzer was an English garden designer and writer on garden subjects, an early exponent of the English landscape garden.
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. There August Designs, his example is Blenheim Palace, denote that Greatness of Mind that reigns in the English Nobility and Gentry".
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.

Life and work

Switzer received sufficient early training in Hampshire to be taken on as a garden boy working for George London and Henry Wise in their Brompton nursery, in Kensington, now part of London.
Switzer helped execute London's designs at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, notably the "wilderness", at Cirencester Park, Gloucestershire, and at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Switzer also designed the garden at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire. He is credited with the landscaping of Leeswood Hall, Flintshire for Sir George Wynne in the 1720s.
In 1715 Stephen Switzer published a work on "Forest, or Rural Gardening", The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener's Recreation, which he expanded to form his Ichnographia. He also published The Practical Husbandman and Planter and An Introduction to a General System of Hydrostaticks and Hydraulicks.
Stephen Switzer included the first lengthy historical sketch of the progress of gardening in England in The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener's Recreation was vocal in the criticism of topiary and the formality of the "Dutch Garden" and introduced the term ferme ornée, the "ornamental farm" integrating the ‘useful’ and ‘profitable’ aspects of kitchen gardening and animal husbandry with apparently artless beautiful and charming views and details.
His main rival in the practical, though not the literary, aspects of early tentative exercises in "naturalistic" planting schemes was Charles Bridgeman.

Selected publications