I have been through the South Park this morning and fear that you will not have nearly as much thinning out done as is needed before the Spring opens. Please call for all the men you can use and take every advantage of the opportunity that you can. There are many clusters of evergreens where the trees are destroying one another. Besides those to which I called your attention the other day please look especially to those East of the marble arch and the cluster on the knoll north of Bow bridge (north of the rustic seat). The deciduous wood still further north, (West of the Ramble), is also much too thick.

The “pruning” has been stopped and will proceed only under your orders. Please order what you think particularly desireable but do not let this interfere at all with thinning out superfluous trees. It is very desireable that suitable bushes of good size should be planted on the transverse road arches and wherever necessary to hide the transverse roads and subways and mask the bridges. Please try to find a sufficient number of such bushes as you go about whereever they can be spared without serious loss; so that as soon as possible they can be moved. Consider this the first important business of the spring. I send you Robinson’s Wild Garden, as I promised. I have marked various passages in the first 40 pages, which be so good as to observe attentively. Robinson expresses the views I have always had for the Ramble, the winter drive district and the more rocky and broken parts of the park. There can be no better place than the Ramble for the perfect realization of the Wild Garden, and I want to stock it in that way as fully and as rapidly as is possible. I shall be much obliged to you for any suggestions you can make for obtaining at the earliest day a large stock of hardy plants that will spread and cover the ground and take care of themselves, grow in shade and root out grass. Of such shrubs and vines, (as of Rubus, Lonicera, Clematis, Vinca and Hedera), as can be propogated this spring it is impossible to start enough. If an overstock were possible it would be soon absorbed on the Morningside and Riverside Parks.