I am sorry to have missed you in my flying visit today. I don’t know that I have anything new to say but I would have been glad of a chance to further urge just at this point some ideas that I have before presented.

I found the place impressing me less pleasantly than usual and that I felt uncertain & worried about it. As the house was not in itself disappointing I finally concluded that the trouble lay in the suggestion of a quality of smugness in its surroundings given by the new dressing of the hillside on the West front. This slope was simply tame and uninteresting before. Now with its smooth, soft, even green surface & its few stuck up nursery trees (as evidently artificial as your chimneys), disposed park-fashion, it is as foreign to the locality as a prairie. With good luck, (in whirlwinds and borers) these trees will after a long time come to something agreeable but for years they can only serve to emphasize the effect manifest in the surface—anything that would grow & take shape of itself having apparently been discarded from the design, rooted out or green-washed over, through preference for an artificial quality.

I tell you my impression & what chiefly produced it because it confirms to my mind that which I had when you first asked my advice & I can’t give it too strongly. The difficulty to be always contended with is the ease of a costly commonplace result—a result which though neither fowl, flesh nor good red-herring shall leave no man room to say that he is not satisfied. You may spend ten times what you are willing to and in forty years have either a tolerable poor park-like place, or a farm with less farm beauty than hundreds of other farms to be bought ready made. But the house you have now put upon it is suited neither to a park nor to a farm. It will be incongruous with the ideal of either—still more with an agglomeration of both. It is a proper summer lodge, so placed in the midst and near the edge of a forest as to command an opposite forest over a sheet of water, with an oasis of ladies’ ground strongly but rudely & in forest fashion built in to the wild hillside with it.

Now what I mean by forest is not full grown trees; it is an aspect of nature such as is found where neither crops nor prepared pasturage occupy the ground. If it were practicable every word of my advice would stand just as well if instead of forest, I said down, or heath or moor. I have been in a most attractive place found in the edge of a treeless space half overgrown with patches of broom, the contrast of which with the fine lawn, trees & shrubbery of the enclosed ground was very effective.

To induce the necessary forest character with all its possibilities of pure forest beauty, and to secure desirable convenience so that it will appear [550] to have been found & not made, (without showing your hand, as it were) is the point of the game. I think it is in the cards to do it completely, but if it is not, I am sure that the next best thing is to come as near to it as you can—and at least to let the intention of any effort that must be betrayed be so evidently the helping of nature to escape from the farmer & the landscape gardener, that the imagination of what is finally to come shall be consistent & satisfactory. If the gardener shows himself outside the walls, “off with his head.” I am sure that it is only by following this rule unflinchingly that you will ever reach a result worthy of your effort.

I could not but think how little satisfactory any ordinary result of gardening—of high gardening—would be as a fore-ground or background for your house, compared with precisely what you have in the pine hillside opposite—And the larger and more unvexed the mass of it, the greater would be the dignity of the place. I much doubt today whether about the cheapest thing you could do would not be the best—this being to sow seeds of pine & larch and let such indigenous growth of birches, hickories, sumachs and bushes grow up with them as would; trusting to the axe a few years hence for selection & grouping & to top dressings for more thrift than could otherwise be expected. I am moved to say this the more from having lately visited the plantations of Mr Forbes at Naushon & Mr Fay at Woods Hole; so sowed—(but not so thinned out or fed.) Your situation is much better than theirs for the purpose but I would rather have done what Mr Fay (working blindly & ignorantly until taught by experience,) has done than what Mr Hunnewell has. Mr Fay has made an immense landscape improvemnt self sustaining & self perpetuating. His planting yields him annually more than it costs at least, while Mr Hunnewell’s wants several thousands a year spent on it to hold it from becoming very seedy if not from going to destruction.

I seriously advise this course. It puts you at once in the way of getting what you most want; In a single year it will begin to establish the true character of the place and shut off the comparison of it with cockney villa grounds, sure otherwise for some time to come to be consciously or unconsciously made to its disadvantage by everyone. Except your 40 acres of dairy ground, I would this month carry tree-seeding over the whole place—Then if you want to plant nursery stock in a regular way on well tilled ground at any point next year or next after, the cost of the seeding will not have been so much that it need prevent you. Meantime, on all ground whereon you don’t interrupt nature, she will be giving you something at least more satisfactory for your August landscape than potatoes, beets, rye or hay stubble, more agreeable even than pasture unless it is pretty bad pasture.

I thought that the house promised exceedingly well—the skylines & the proportions and grouping of the roofs very pleasing and the stone more [551]

View of John C. Phillips house, designed by Peabody and Stearns showing roofline and wooden terraces on south side

[552]

View of terrace (“Tiled Terrace”), John C. Phillips House

I like your wood-work terrace less now that I see more clearly how it is to appear in connection with the solid stone wall than I did when I first did not like it. I am sure that the raft now framing on the west front is wrong and I must advise you strenuously to take it away. But as I don’t think that you will, I enclose tracing of the best arrangmnt that I have been able to make for bringing it into connection with the approach & the lawn. I don’t think it is very good but I can’t think of anything better. I intend the lawn to be graded flush with the floor of the terrace all along the South face of the house. It must drop off a little at first to make a water way, as I explained to Watson.

The plans I saw & the work done look as if it was still proposed to put some sort of screen or break between the covered wooden and the open the terrace at A (on the sketch enclosed). You had something of this sort in view before the open terrace was planned but in designing the open terrace, I assumed [553] that the intention would be abandoned. If it is not to be, my work is wrong but I can’t see the use or propriety of any obstruction at that point & think its retention if it is retained must be an oversight. If not, the line of the terrace walk needs revision. All the time I am sure that it would be better to have gravel all the way round than to divide between the & boards, if the question is of expense—the wood lying in the position most favorable to decay will always contradict the effect of the stone walls, and the wood floor subject to the same use and the same destructive agencies on one side of the dotted line A as on the other will seem a piece of make shift patch-work. I see no argumnt for a wood floor on the South side that does not apply to the East. The conditions differ only in that a part of one is to have a wooden awning & a part of the other an awning of canvas.

It struck me that your road was likely to be unpleasantly conspicuous & to appear meaninglessly meandering for some time to come—There is really a reason for every curve and as the borders become woody it will be all right. But perhaps in finishing you may reduce the breadth a little. Where water will not run off from the sides, a broad shallow turf gutter is much better than a narrow deep one & I hope no paving will be needed at any point. The border of the road should never be abrupt, the ground should invariably rise or fall from it with a long curving slope, so that the road may not be an evident or very pronounced construction.

Could you not be planting some prostrate junipers & Pinus mugho along the bottom of {the} terrace-wall now? It looks so badly as it is & the regular deciduous planting season is so short & hurried. Next summer this wall should fully realize its design.