I have just received your favor of the 9th. My plan for the mountain approach roads went from here on the 7th and should have been in your hands when your letter was written. I hope that it has since been received and found satisfactory. Be so good as to advise me.

I would be glad to have your attention particularly given to the suggestion of an approach from the corner of the Reservoir. It is important to keep in mind that your object is a pleasure drive and that, provided the route is interesting, a few minutes more or less to be spent upon it is a matter of small consequence—in some respects even an advantage, {for} which excessive crookedness and steepness are very objectionable. Your pleasure is not to be [157] all concentrated on the top of the mountain and the base treated as a disagreeable necessity to be got through with in the shortest possible way at any cost. Looking at it all as a part of your park—the ascent of Peel Street or the upper part of McTavish can never be made a pleasure drive—it will be postively painful. On the other hand, with moderate improvements in the lower part of McTavish Street you may be able to drive from Sherbrooke by the way I suggest to the top of the mountain at a trot, with pleasanter scenery and easier turns. It is true that with a strong horse and harness you could make the distance about 5 minutes shorter by Peel Street, but to do so you would make a toil of pleasure.

Perhaps from the point of view to which you have been obliged to accustom yourselves in Montreal my objections to such a comparatively short piece of steep road may not seem very weighty, but you will remember that study of refinement in such matters is the main part of my business.

Looking either to comfort in ascending the mountain or to the most refined art in landscape effect I should advise no approach from Peel Street. If the commission think it necessary I am willing to do all I can to make the best of it, but I fear that at its best it will be an ugly job. The whole impression of a drive in the park—up the mountain—will be a more consistently impressive one, if the reservoir route is taken and no other is opened to the South of it.

I have just received your favor of the 30th ulto.

I believe that the word exotic is something more than a synonym of foreign or strange“it carries a sense of unnatural, out of harmony with local natural conditions. If so, you take for granted the sole point to which the argument of my last letter was directed. If the attention of more than one in ten or fifty thousand, and that one other than a botanist, is to be supposed divertible in the slightest degree from the landscape as a whole by the plants I have named and stand for more than by those you stand for, my advocacy of them falls to the ground. Does the occurrence of the little red or yellow clover or the buttercups in the pastures of Walpole or the barberry on the hills of Andover distract attention from the loveliness of the Connecticut or the Merrimac vallies?

I go with you and beyond you on the line of your argument, for I have no doubt at all about the misfortune of the profile, and stand ready to contribute to blow its nose off with gunpowder without waiting for an earthquake. That is precisely what landscape gardening should do I think, make improvements by design which nature might by chance make through the action of earthquakes, storms, frosts, birds and insects.

(I have this in print, and will send it to you if I can get a copy of my paper.)

I fully endorse every word you say, except that I am not disposed to regard the trumpet creeper as necessarily a permanent exotic in the White Hills, and should not wait to be sure that it had found its way there by chance already before using it as a very valuable means of preventing the railroad from doing the scenery an injury.