Three volumes on the making of a country seat: the choice of the site, the ground, the planting of woods and the laying out of gardens. Switzer argued against the walled parterre and for what he called rural and extensive gardening, the whole estate laid out as one design, with the walks led out into the woods and fields.
Stephen Switzer (c. 1682–1745) was trained under George London and Henry Wise at the Brompton Park nursery, the leading garden-makers of the reign of Queen Anne, and worked with them at Blenheim and Castle Howard. He wrote on fruit and kitchen gardens and on water as well as on design, and sold seeds from a shop in Westminster Hall.
The Ichnographia was among the first English books to argue for the open, extended garden. Switzer still laid out straight walks and regular groves, but he wanted the walls that shut the old gardens in taken down, the boundary hidden, and the farm and the woods brought into the design, so that the useful and the pleasant were mixed. He is often counted with Bridgeman and Kent among the makers of the landscape garden.
The book, part by part
I Volume I: the history and the site
Gardening from the ancients to his own day; the choice of a seat, its air, water and soil.
II Volumes II and III: planting and design
Woods, groves and avenues; the design of rural and extensive gardens, with the walks carried out into the estate.