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. Francis Johnson's bibliography of early writers on gardening re-introduced Switzer, suggesting that he considered as the Father of English Gardening. Switzer's literary legacy was carried on in the two posthumous editions of The Practical Fruit Gardener of 1752 and 1763. When in the 1930s B Sprague Allen wrote her Tides in English Taste it was the utile aspect of Switzer's ideas that made them those of the mere gardener, clearly unable to fully appreciate poetic matters. In the centuries since Switzer's death the Landscape Garden, in one or another of its various expressions, has remained the default manner. The expertise which created Switzer's cascades and water-works was soon put to providing an infrastructure to move manufactured goods and fuels cheaply about the country.
