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. For Switzer the Biblical ancients, having been driven out of Paradise, worked slowly and with much toil, "living a Pastoral Life in open Fields and moveable Tents and Gardening was doubtless little known or practised by them" before David's or Solomon's time. In Switzer's time villa was used to describe a small house only but one of some distinction because of its design, contents or setting. This is also after ancient usage, and by the time of Marcus Terentius Varro villa was being used in this sense too. For Switzer, apart from his various assertions that vineyards in parts of England produce very good wine, the very significant portion of Columella about Trees.
