We have just heard, indirectly and unofficially, of your election as President. We had previously sent to your office a drawing and a report on the question of the use to be made of the Midway. There is one view to be taken of this matter which we cannot very well present in an official paper, but of which it may be desirable that you should have some understanding.

To us it appears that this thousand acre property of your Commission [773]provides the best condition for the metropolitan park of the great future city of Chicago, and that the smaller recreation grounds of the northern and western borders of the city will eventually bear a relation to it in some degree similar to that which Regent’s, Victoria, Battersea, Waterlo and Greenwich bear to Hyde Park in London.

It is not yet the habit of the people of Chicago to take that view of it. They have seemed to me to look upon the South Park Commission less as their agency to provide such a park for the whole future people of Chicago than as an agency for promoting the interests of the owners of certain real estate in a particular part of the present city. And I do not suppose that the present Commissioners have wholly escaped the natural influences upon themselves of such a popular habit. I am pretty sure that their predecessors in 1870 had not.

It seems plain to us, however, that the more fully this thousand acre body of land, with its great outlook over the Lake, which may be considered for the present purpose as the equivalent of a thousand acres more, should be laid out and fitted as one continuous park, with studied suitability to the function of the main metropolitan park of the city, and that the more apparent its adaptation is made to this purpose, the more assuredly will its character in this respect gradually come to be generally accepted.

Having in view your adoption of the general policy thus suggested, there is a consideration to be taken into account, which I may suggest in this way: Two years ago I spent four days afloat on the Thames and found that during the hot weather many times more people were taking their recreation upon it than in the park. There were many times more small pleasure boats in use on the Thames than pleasure carriages in the parks. I found something of the same tendency on the Seine at Paris. And here in New England, where satisfactory facilities are afforded, the custom of taking a boat instead of a wheeled vehicle for the afternoon pleasure outing of a family is rapidly gaining ground. I am confident that wherever circumstances are favorable this custom is going to become established, and that the more completely any public resort is adapted to it, the greater and the more satisfactory will be the future development of the tendency. The Boston Park Department is acting largely in view of this probability, and in one of our parks where the preparations for the purpose are as yet of the crudest character, as many as a hundred small boats, most of them private property, are already in use.

I send you a report prepared by my partner, Mr. Eliot, and published by the Metropolitan Park Commission of Boston. Among the appended illustrations of this Report you will find one, No. 17, which is suggestive of the present drift of fashion in this respect. I saw, near London, hundreds of fashionable ladies, each in a little mahogany boat. Often there were gentlemen with them, each in a separate boat of the same class, and they moved together as ladies and gentlemen do when on horseback. Sometimes schools of such boats were to be seen moving in company.

I visited the Office of the Commissioners having the official [774]regulation of this pleasure use of the Thames and was informed that there were, in 1892, over 12000 small pleasure boats (of such sorts as would be appropriately used in the waters of the South Park), registered on their books, and I believe that I saw in one day not less than 40,000 people in these small boats on the Thames.

There are two newspapers now published in London with special reference to pleasure boating on the Thames, and having their circulation among those given to this method of recreation.

I have given you these illustrations of a present tendency of fashion which you will recognize that I had in view as likely to come, twenty-five years ago. I saw, then, that with proper facilities, and under proper development, boats were sure to serve better than wheeled carriages as a means of healthful recreation for great numbers of people. The only reason that this has not been evident heretofore is the want of suitable places. In Chicago, for example, boating on the Lake can never be a fashionable form of recreation, but boating on protected lagoons and canals, with pleasant scenery and invigorating ozonized air, is sure in hot weather to be more popular than driving on the roads. I am confident that it will be wise and provident for your Board to have this in view. There is every reason that the South Park of Chicago should be the finest domestic boating park in the world when such domestic and social boating comes to be as fashionable a form of recreation as I am confident it is permanently going to be.

Respectfully Yours

I have received your note of 27th April with proofs, which I herewith return, I am sorry to say, in a mutilated condition.

Being dissatisfied with the original article furnished the Cyclopaedia, I hoped by extraction and insertion to shape an article that would be more to my mind. The result, because of my literary unskillfulness, being botchy, an editorial revision has been made. My manuscript not coming with the proof, [776]I am not sure for how much of the article as it now stands in type I am responsible. I judge, however, that the revision has been made under the influence of a doctrinal view which I think in the highest degree heretical.

The introductory definition, editorially inserted, limits the function of Landscape Architecture to the forming of “scenes.”

“The various details are subordinated to a characteristic effect of the scene as a whole.”

I suppose from this and other indications that in the editorial mind the word landscape in the term landscape gardening has the same meaning that it has in the term landscape painting. I believe that this is an historical mistake, and a mistake which is at the root of countless errors in practice. The term “landscape gardening” was introduced as a convenient means of distinguishing gardening applied with certain motives from “Italian,” “geometric,” “formal,” “architectural” gardening. So different was the purpose of landscape gardening that Horace Walpole and others refer to it not as a new school of an old art, but as a “new-born” art. The Italian gardening, the results of which are described by Mr. Platt, is no more landscape gardening in this original use of the term than genre painting is landscape painting.

The use of the word park, made editorially, with reference to the ground adjoining the garden at Fontainbleau, is not in accordance with English usage, and is liable to suggest to one brought up on English literature wholly wrong ideas of the scenery of this ground.

The common and popular use of the word park in America, as it has floated traditionally to us from old English springs, is shown by the idea which is conveyed in the work park-like. This, I apprehend to be as far as possible from the idea of scenery in the likeness of that of a French parc. Again, it is illustrated by the fact that in Colorado, for example, various places have been named parks on our Government maps. These names were first applied descriptively by the pioneer settlers and officially accepted and made proper names by the Government. Examples of them are “South Park,” “North Park,” “Smith’s Park,” and “Jones’s Park.” There are scores of them. In every case the designation park is applied to them because of their scenery and nothing else, and in every case their scenery has a certain resemblance to the characteristic scenery of an English park, and not the most distant resemblance to that of a French parc. They are invariably, as far as I have seen them, prairie-like spaces surrounded and interspersed with scattered trees and scattered groups and bodies of trees naturally and in some degree picturesquely disposed. Such scenery is distinctly antithetical to the scenery of a French parc as it is to the scenery of a Roman villa. But it was to the opening, improving and making more available to enjoyment of such English park scenery by Kent that the word landscape first came into use in connection with the word gardening, and any other use of it must be confusing to the general American public. Landscape gardening and English gardening have been used as synonymous terms.

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So far as the question I have been discussing is to be considered a literary question, I do not wish to appear to express my views in an authoritative manner, but simply to show that what I consider to be the editor’s point of view differs from that which I am in the habit of taking, and to point out the danger which this involves.

I do not like to attempt a definition. There are some terms of which any brief definition is liable to be misleading, and I have never found the meaning of the term landscape architecture or landscape gardening at all fairly expressed in one or two sentences. But, agreeing that an introductory definition is wanted, I offer the best that I can in a reasonably brief form, prefixing it to the proof sheets. This will show the ground of my protest against the editorial doctrine.

Yours Respectfully