I have only today, after returning from the West, been able to look over your drawings. My object in asking you to send them was simply to know for what work I could if opportunity offered suggest your employmnt, not to criticise or advise. But as you invite me, I will observe that it strikes me that your study & practice so far as indicated has been too much limited to small pleasure-ground work in which consistent broad effects of natural landscape are out of the question. The only illustration of what I regard as the higher field of landscape gardening is that to which you refer of the work of Puckler Muskau, which I wish much that I had seen. I don’t mean to speak disrespectfully of pleasure ground & flower garden work such as is nearly always called for near a house and which alone gives much general employmt to gardeners but only to urge you to be ambitious to be master in higher fields, as to which you can learn little in the Central Park or in any of the situations open or likely to be open to you. Take any of these therefore as means of living and make yourself as perfect as possible in all that pertains to them & all that you can learn in them, but by reading & reflection and such excursions as you can afford for enjoyment of natural scenery educate yourself above them. For this purpose a day’s walk along the valley of any stream or among the foot hills of any mountain range would be worth more to you than a year in the park. I do not mean to advise you to neglect study of improved scenery. There are various places on the Hudson, Hyde Park laid out by Dr Hosack; for example, in which magnificent nature gains by foregrounds of art. You will find most referred to in Downing’s Landscape Gardening. But bear always in mind that landscape gardening has natural scenery and the art to conceal art as its highest aim and that where we have one man qualified for work of this higher kind there are thousands in competition for the lower fields.

Aim to free yourself from German associations, not because they are [589] not excellent but because you have been too much confined in your education to them and they are likely to cramp your capabilities and limit your influence and opportunities. Remember that in America the German demand for landscape gardening is likely to be but a small part of all that is to come and you don’t want to be tied to it, or, give the impression that you are. Your writing shows that your English is much affected by German idioms & your English vocabulary not as copious as desirable. Hold yourself one of the universal republic of art, free to receive light, free to work, on all sides.

Seek in the public libraries and read, study deliberately, the older English works on landscape gardening. Repton, Loudon, Gilpin, above all Price (on the Picturesque). All are faulty & to be read discriminatingly but all are in earnest and of high ideals, and in your present stage will be of invaluable service in keeping them before you.

A railway company in Missouri may want a man to take charge of a public picnic or excursion ground. The President is to be in New York soon and having your address may ask you to call on him. He is himself a landscape gardener of great ability. I mention it only that if he should send for you, you may {be} prompt and prepared to present yourself to advantage.

Yours of 17th ulto was duly recvd & I should have replied to it sooner but that I have had to be away from home.

If I had to consult solely my own judgmnt, (taste, sense of fitness and practicable ideals) I should have no landscape gardening, no composition, grouping or display of foliage effects on your moraine place at all. I should have dense forest right up to & about the house, with only such breaks and openings as would come of themselves in seeking convenience and comfort in roads, walks, house-garden, lawn, yards, and the walls, hedges, thickets, stairways & out-structures. As a matter of comfort and propriety I would seclude the lawn &c from the road, the thicket for this purpose serving as a wind-break from the chilly N.W. wind; I would guard against trees growing up where they would keep the morning sun from the house, lawn & terrace, and I would decorate the artificial features of the house wall & lawn with bushes & vines. As the trees grew up, I would thin them out, with a little more care to develop beauty of individuals, groups & masses to be seen from the house than in ordinary commercial forestry but with equal care to avoid suggesting a lawn or park or any effort & study for the purpose. I would use no sythe, broom or rake on this side and if this left the ground forlorn, would scatter about low bushes, vines and creepers enough to screen it.

[591]

I would dispense with all views to the westward from the house except into or, for the front, over, the wood, and would have a stranger arrive and enter the house without a suspicion of the broad & extended views in its East & South outlooks; the unexpectedness of these and the strong contrast of character in all detail & scenery of the domestic and confidential lawn & terrace with that of the carriage, public, woodland, stable & kitchen sides of the house being its most striking distinction from the common run of villas & country seats.

As I could never get you to quite fully accept or even Sargent to approve of this idea I suppose I must consider it extreme to the point of offensive eccentricity. Then the question is, how much dilution of common-place is necessary? Suppose the wood as it exists about your stable extended over the house site, there being several hundred trees from five to fifty years old to the acre. What would you cut out? Having in view the expanse from N.E. to S.W. from the terrace & lawn, what openings on the other side would you feel bound to make? I send a skeleton map with suggestions in pencil for groups of park-like treatment, leaving from 100 to 150 feet in which sufficient light would fall on the ground to allow a fair close turf to be maintained. If this would be so far satisfactory (all beyond to the West & N. West being close-planted forest), I will if you wish send a detailed planting map. (I should use chiefly elms & bass wood with a view to rapid lofty growth grouping with the house, in views of it from the E., North & South).

Between the lawn & the approach road AAA I should aim at an impervious thicket of small trees, as horn beam, hop-horn, dogwood, white birch, laburnums, Kohlreuteria, sassafras, mountain ash, moose wood &c. faced with bushy shrubs, and on the lawn side I would bring this thicket to a regular formal hedge of hornbeam, or if you prefer something more delicate or elegant, of privet, buckthorn or Cydonia Japonica. If, however, you want more of proper shrubbery than the few groups required for furnishing the lawn or than could be consistently introduced in the wild garden below the terrace, then I would make the garden face of this thicket (AAA) the shrubbery.

The points to be guarded are (1) that the house shall seem in approaching it from Beverly to be standing in the midst or on the edge of a wild forest, (2) that nothing shall be seen of the Eastern outlook or of the lawn or finished ground from the approach (3) that the lawn, terrace & the part of the house opening upon them shall appear all one affair, refined, domestic and sharply seperated, secluded and distinct in quality from everything else in the vicinity. So that in going or looking from it, you will seem to be everywhere going or looking into an outer world.

I write & send you the map that you may return the latter with a more definite statement of what you feel to be desirable, when I will fill it out sufficiently for working purposes.