I was very sorry not to see you when I was last in Baltimore. In the brief interview that I had with Mr Lanahan I promised that I would write to you in regard to one matter which gave me concern and for which he said that you were responsible but I don’t like to take that one and leave others unnoticed, all of which have I fear a common root and one which does not exist in your mind alone.

While I write to you therefore what I say will have a general application and I will thank you to communicate the substance of it, if you please, to your fellow Commissioners.

When your Board first did me the honor to seek my advice I was told that you intended to give me so large a degree of trust that whatever fault should be found with the work that should afterwards be done you could say “that is entirely the fault of Mr Olmsted.” You believed that I knew my business and you proposed within due financial and legal limits to trust me implicitly and take the risk of the results.

Now my experience had been such in other city works of a like character that I perfectly well knew that before any plan which I should recommend to you in the premises, could be well carried out, there would be a long interval in which you would have to bear up against much misconception and false and impatient judgmnt rashly & clamorously expressed. I knew that with those from whom the clamor would arise the fact that I had accomplished results popularly satisfactory elsewhere and that I had had in view a result only to be obtained by a process of developmnt extending through a period of some years would have not the slightest weight. I knew consequently that you were likely long before a popular success should crown your work to find it a weary and thankless task.

Accordingly, as you will, I doubt not, remember, I then, (that is to say, in our first interview) advised you to consider well whether it would not be wiser to forego the intention of reconstructing the parks upon an entirely new plan. I distinctly expressed the opinion that with a much smaller expenditure than would be necessary for that purpose you might get most satisfactory results by simply revising and improving them in general accordance with the original plan.

You decided not to adopt this suggestion, and I proceeded to prepare such plans as I thought would be found permanantly satisfactory under the peculiar circumstances of the situation.

When I finally submitted the plan for the South Park you will remember [367] that I distinctly informed you that it involved the sacrifice of all the trees good and bad on its borders, and that if you adopted it you must be prepared for a great outcry from those who would not understand the necessity for this proceeding nor realize for years afterwards what adequate gain was to be obtained for the loss.

Nor have I at any time since given you the slightest room for supposing that a result satisfactory to the public, or one by which any part of your outlay would be obviously justified, could be expected until after the designed elements of permanent foliage had been slowly developed by adequate skilful labor.

For this reason I have the more urged that everything possible should be done to secure and preserve neatness, firmness, accuracy in these elements of the park not to be covered and enriched by foliage and the substantial, well designed qualities and fitness for their purposes of which could be in a great measure appreciated at once by every passerby.

I begged last winter just before I sailed for Europe, that your new gardener might be made, by every practicable exertion, to feel that no neglect on his part in this particular could be passed over for a single day without its being observed and reproved by the Commissioners individually and by others interested in establishing a high standard of excellence in the keeping of the parks.

I begged also that you would take every care that he should not be influenced in the slightest by the popular demand for immediate results other than these, such as it would be perfectly easy to secure at trifling expenditure (for example by tricking out the parks with bedding or foliage or subtropical plants), because it would be sure to divert him from the only course of managmnt by which it would be possible for you to present within reasonable time any sound justification of the outlay you had made in construction.

Accustomed as I am to disappointmnts in these respects, even to see my best work entirely wrecked by impatience of the slow processes through which alone it has any worth, I confess that I felt very much grieved when I came to Baltimore this spring to observe how completely you had abandoned all thought of pursuing such a policy.

There are everywhere people who are savagely impatient of well studied and prolonged processes of serving any purpose, even for their own good, and who have a ravenous appetite for smart superficial criticism of matters of which they are themselves profoundly ignorant. How much it is necessary to concede in your case to the weight and drag which directly and indirectly such people have in all city politics it is for you to judge, but you must be aware that for such parks as you are likely to have if you neglect such necessary managmnt of them as I have from the outset assumed would be practicable I cannot justly be held in any way responsible.

Mr Lanahan is greatly disturbed about the lamps which you received while I was absent in Europe. I believe he has been led to greatly overestimate [368] their defects and I fear has been induced to adopt unnecessarily expensive means of remedying them. But if I am mistaken it is a comparatively small matter, for the lamps are of little essential importance in the main design. Other lamps, at least, of considerably different character might be substituted for them without vitiating it. It will not be so if you substitute a bed of rank grass & weeds for a close mantle of ivy, in the very centre of one of the parks or if you neglect the essential conditions of healthy growth in the largest and most important element of the other, or if you take no trouble to make the simplest repairs in connection with the stone work the necessity of which I have so particularly enjoined in advance.

If you need, which I hardly suppose, to have what I refer to more particularly pointed out, Mr Wisedell will be able to show it to you and to advise what can now best be done.

The main point at this moment is to have the old trees removed, it being wholly impossible for the designed bodies of foliage to be formed under their shade.