Stephen Switzer

Who was Stephen Switzer?

Stephen Switzer was a garden designer and writer on garden subjects, an early exponent of the English landscape garden who 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". 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.

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.