Although I have been so long acoming to the point of saying so I enjoyed your letter from London exceedingly. I thought you had been both wise and fortunate in your proceedings and your comments on what you saw were most interesting. I agreed with you at all points, though I should say with regard to Andre’s work at Liverpool I did no more than glance at it in a rainy day—not even leaving the cab that I remember—and it seemed to me that whatever the

[282] plan, it had been so perfunctorily carried out, as if by a commercial contractor, sticking closely to the letter of his specifications, and with such mean, mechanical and stinted detail that one could hardly judge what the designer had had in view.

I was particularly interested in what you said of the manner in which you found that large business in Landscape Gardening was conducted in London, or from London, and I hope that during the summer you will be able to visit several of the works so managed, follow out details and judge how it works out from seeing also some finished results. The organization would seem to compare with Bowditch’s and I suppose that Andre has generally proceeded in the same way. I should think it difficult to avoid a good deal of crudity in the results, such as you see in some of Andre’s public work even in Paris. I mean engineer’s slopes and a prosaic quality in details which he accounted for by saying that his plans had been murdered by the engineers in superintendence.

We have had a call from a man who has been a curator of an English Botanic Garden and designer of a considerable public work. He had a slight reserved testimonial indicating that he had published something that did not displease Ruskin and altogether seemed to have been a man of some professional standing. Assuming “a certain free masonry of our craft” he astonished us by the coolness and freedom with which he referred to alledged practices in it. No man, in his opinion, ever acquired a notable position or earned a decent living thro’ Landscape Gardening except by taking advantage of the ignorance and credulity of his client. Nothing could be done directly by what we should regard as professional work. The making of plans was but the stepping stone to all sorts of underhanded commissions & profits through connivance or covert partnerships [283]

with contractors, or by directly taking contracts to execute plans, being your own superintendent. He advised us with which of the large nurserymen profitable arrangements could best be made with and offered to make arrangements by which we could be sure of receiving a handsome percentage on all orders that we could influence. He was quite sure that all the leading men of the profession in [284] England pursued his methods. All were tradesmen and contractors and brokers under the disguise of professional men. He could not believe that we were not. We thought he came out to get the Superintendence of the “Niagara Park” and that he meant to remain here at any rate.

My delay in writing you has happened mainly because when your letter came I was expecting to submit the Franklin (West Roxbury Park) and thought you would like to have the result. For various reasons it was thought best to postpone the delivery of it from week to week until the first of Feby. The Board and the Mayor then took a week or two to consider it and since its acceptance we have been waiting upon the lithographers. In a day or two we shall be able to send you a pamphlet about it. The plan is accepted without a murmur but the fact is neither the Commissioners nor the public look at it or take any intelligent interest in it. We are in hopes that the legislature may be induced to authorize a fifty years loan for the parks. You will see that my paper is indirectly all an argument for its doing so. The Mayor and Commissioners have agreed to urge it. If they fail the outlook is not bright.

I don’t think that we have any new work in the office since you left. Harry Codman is still with us and Coolidge comes in twice a week. You will have heard of the great flood. The Back Bay and Muddy River arrangements worked [285]smoothly and with perfect success, the water never rising more than three feet and normal conditions returning without the slightest apparent damage.

I go to Washington tonight to try to persuade Congress not to order the terrace to be furnished with windows with a view to pleasant rooms for Committees looking out on the grounds—a fearful botching which Clark advises me they have determined on.

If you are still to go to Venice, I hope you will have read Howell’s Venetian Days. Somewhere in it he refers to old villas, still occupied by Venetians in summer, on the banks of the Po in a way that led me to think that they would be well worth visiting.

When you are in England, again, if you can find the village of Hare Street and that it is not much out of the way, you might like to see the present condition of the cottage and its garden that Repton says, at the close of his book, has been the most interesting place in the world to him. The house in which he died a few months later. If there happens to be a local photographer there I shall be glad if you can order a picture of it taken for me.

All the shop and the family send Greetings.

Yours Very Truly,