City Readers Digital Historic Collections at the New York Society Library
Stephen Switzer (1682-1745)
Stephen Switzer (1682–1745) 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.