Ichnographia Rustica

Brogden’s approach is chronological. Each chapter identifies stages in Switzer’s progress, with discussions of sites relevant to that period of his career. Thus the first sees him outlining Switzer’ debts to the classics and then, rather cursorily, a cluster of contemporary writers, before moving on to his apprenticeship with London and Wise at Brompton Park Nurseries.

At this stage it is hard to see what exactly, if anything, Switzer designed. His writings that talk about key sites –Cassiobury, Castle Howard’ Ray Wood –tell us more about his early ideas on rural gardening than what he did himself to implement them. He worked at Blenheim (digging the foundations for Vanbrugh’ bridge), and formed the gravel pit at Kensington Palace into an amphitheatre.

John Dixon Hunt, Historic Gardens Newsletter, January 2018, No. 47

Dr William Brogden’s biography of Stephen Switzer fills a wide gap in the history of the English landscape garden during the first half of the eighteenth century. Switzer, uniquely, was celebrated as the author of practical and theoretical books on garden design, as well as a collaborator with Charles Bridgeman, Sir John Vanbrugh, and other pioneers.

To make his case, Brogden considers the writings of other scholars, and brings together a range of published, manuscript, and pictorial sources to assess Switzer’s role in the design of the landscapes of Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, Lumley |Castle and elsewhere. In so doing, Brogden makes a major contribution to our understanding of their evolution. All told, this is an important and original book.

Peter Willis

The name Switzer reminds me of my writing up the domestic buildings for Pevsner's Lincolnshire in 1960. I was at Grimsthorpe having enjoyed Lord Ancaster's lunch, and we were standing on the terrace on the garden side of the house, when Ancaster asked, who would have designed the garden, an old formal one that had been landscaped late in the 18th century? My reply was that it could have been Stephen Switzer the author of a treatise called Ichnographica Rustica. Alas, then there was no Bill Brogden to observe in his new and exciting book that Switzer had invented a new landscape design called 'rural and extensive', gardening, intended that a whole estate could be opened up to the surrounding countryside. Rightly Brogden observes that this is a very modern concept, anticipating landscape design in our own day.

John Harris, Curator of the Drawings Collection of the RIBA

Switzer is the mystery man of landscape history no more, this new study reveals his innovative ideas which will inspire designers in all land management disciplines

Jane Brown, author of Lancelot Capability Brown, The Omnipotent Magician

George William Johnson remarks in his History of Gardening (1829) that neglect has pursued Switzer ‘beyond the grave, for his works are seldom mentioned and quoted as authorities of the age he lived in’. He was ‘the best author of his time’ and among the ‘Classic Authors of Gardening’. Modest and candid, he was a ‘sound, practical Horticulturist, a man well versed in Botanical Science of the day, in its most enlarged sense’. This glowing assessment still holds true today: Switzer is among the most original, eloquent, informed and influential garden writers and practitioners of eighteenth-century England, yet his written and practical work has been overshadowed by the achievements of his contemporaries. Brogden’s long-awaited book redresses this deficiency, supplying the first detailed account of this ingenious landscape improver and his rich and varied contribution to contemporary landscape theory and practice. Ichnographia Rustica: Stephen Switzer and the Designed Landscape will ensure that Switzer is finally admitted to the pantheon of British garden greats, and that his name should soon become as familiar as his fellow ‘landskip improvers’ William Kent, Charles Bridgeman and Humphry Repton.

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Lecturer, Historical and Sustainable Architecture, NYU (London)