You will remember that when you were going to France last Summer, I advised you to try to visit the nursery of Croux et Fils near Paris, which has long had a distinctive reputation for supplying fruit trees in various forms, [603]particularly adapted to wall, espalier and other special modes of refined garden culture. I had visited this nursery with reference to the furnishing of your garden at Biltmore and had found its examples of various forms of fruit culture; its resources for supplying stock for the purpose, and the special experience of the proprietors, very remarkable. The particular Mr. Croux to whom I was introduced by Monsieur André is an intelligent and cultivated gentleman. He had travelled in America and appeared to be well informed as to the general conditions of horticulture with us.

After my last visit to Biltmore, I wrote him very fully of the situation and circumstances of your garden, sending a plan and three photographs of it, and all such particulars as I thought needful to obtain from him a proposal to supply such stock, partly advanced in training, as might be desirably grown upon the outer walls; on trellises upon the two terrace walls; en cordon alongside some of the walks, and otherwise, as I had seen fruit trees grown in his own garden and in some other gardens that I visited in France.

In reply, a letter has come, of which I enclose a translation. My letter to him was written in English, and it seemed to me that he must have replied hastily, without carefully reading it, or examining the papers and plans which we enclosed with it. He does not make a tender for supplying the trees, nor give the information for which I specially asked. He asks for information which I had given him fully and exactly, and instructs us upon points upon which, with a better understanding of what I wrote, he would have inferred that I was well informed, and had the intention that he advises should be adopted. Plainly, he thinks that it would be unwise to undertake to make a fruit garden suitable to be associated with your Biltmore house, without the aid of a Frenchman specially trained for the purpose. He wants to make some arrangement by which, in connection with the Fair at Chicago, he could send a man to get the work started for you. I doubt the practicability of his suggestion in this respect, but submit it for your consideration. It would, I think, be indispensable that the man sent should speak English. He could not, as Mr. Croux suggests, spend one week at Biltmore alternately with three in Chicago. It would probably be difficult to board him satisfactorily at Biltmore. He would probably be dumbfounded by the wild condition of the country there. A Frenchman is rarely good in adjusting himself to colonial or frontier conditions. Perhaps it would be best to postpone the whole matter until after the Exposition season and see if an arrangement cannot be made to have the man whom he proposes to send here this Summer come to Biltmore late in the Fall and stay long enough to complete the trellising arrangements, and to plant and start the trees that might be imported from Mr. Croux.

I wait to hear your judgment before replying to Mr. Croux. We have a telegram from him asking for an early reply.

Yours respectfully,