ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an explanation of how Stephen Switzer, and his colleagues and contemporaries first made what he had called Ichnographia Rustica, or more familiarly Modern Gardening from the mid-1740s, land later landscape gardens. Switzer advised that one should follow nature. To some following nature was a good thing only so long as it is the currently admired version of nature. Shaftesbury and the other Neo-Platonists had a more grown-up idea of what that might mean. Switzer and Campbell were associated as garden designer and architect at Stour-head, and Switzer may have provided Campbell with the layout of Wilton and others published in volume 3 of Vitruvius Britannicus such as Hampton Court, Herefordshire, and perhaps also Thoresby and Lowther. If Caversham can represent the early 18th century perfection of "Nature to advantage dressed" then Wilton House gardens are among its earliest essays in the islands, and also its exemplar.
