I came home late last night and have only just now known of “ART OUT OF DOORS.” I have but glimpsed through it, keeping it to read when I shall be less subject to interruptions.

I am proud of the elevation in which it places me, but must say that it makes me feel a little giddy and unsafe to stand in such a position and that I am carried further in the direction that my note written the other day at your house indicated that I was then tending. I have all confidence in your judgment and I shall gladly help you as best I can in all that about which you will let me help you, (I am writing on the text of Mr. Johnson’s note to me), but it seems to me that a magazine article on my works can be little more than a catalogue raisonne,’ and that something more comprehensive, or something more limited in scope, would have greater public value. To show what I mean by this alternative, I will mention that I have had some professional responsibility for close upon a hundred public grounds, but I am not accustomed to class more than twenty of these as “parks,” reserving that term for places [624]distinguished not for trees or for groups and masses of trees, or for flowers or statues, or roads or bridges, or for collections of these and other fine things, nor for landscapes as painters use the term, nor for anything related to what the word garden formerly meant, and in common popular use means now. I reserve the word park for places with breadth and space enough, and with all other needed qualities to justify the application to what you find in them of the word scenery, or of the word landscape in its older and more radical sense, which is much the same as that of scenery. (By the way, do you know that Sir Walter Scott protested against the introduction of the word landscape-gardening as likely to confuse two distinct arts: that is to say, the art of gardening and the art of landscape or scenery-making? And, by the way again, did not Milton use the word architecture for the working out of the divine design for the heavens? Architecture is not rightly to be limited to works of buildings. Gardening is rightly to be limited to garden work, which work does not conveniently include that, for instance, of exposing great ledges, damming streams, making lakes, tunnels, bridges, terraces and canals).

The question I wish you to consider is whether it would not be better to have a more comprehensive handle to a more distinctly limited topic; whether you might not write, for example, on scenery-making and scenery-mending, with illustrations, or the citing of examples, if you please, from American public works that would come under that category? It would now be possible to refer to several public works in which considerable progress had been made towards a new ideal of local scenery. Vaux and I agreed, when we began to design the Central Park, that we would have in view effects to be attained in not less than forty years. Thirty-seven years of that time will have passed next Winter.

There is a special reason why I shrink from what Mr. Johnson proposes, which I can perhaps explain in this way: I should have had nothing to do with the design of the Central Park, or of Prospect Park, had not Vaux invited me to join him in those works. But for his invitation I should not have been a landscape architect. I should have been a farmer. He was then already established as a landscape architect, having been a partner of Mr. Downing. I do not like to be given credit for the design of these works when he is not given quite equal credit. It is distinctly unjust that I should.

Then, to quite half my works my son John has contributed in an important degree. It is impossible to apportion credit, so much to one, so much to another, for the general result that may come from the striking together of two or more minds in prolonged, practical discussions. Consider this point with reference to Harry. You and others try to be just to him, but you cannot rightly give me the smallest credit for one part of a common work, to him for another part, and to John for a third part. Not one of us has done anything that the others have not helped him to do. In every one of our works there has been a merging of thought into thought, so that to differentiate individual originations is quite out of the question.

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Nothing can be written on the subject with profit in my opinion in which extreme care is not taken to discriminate between what is meant in common use of the words garden, gardening, gardener, and the art which I try to pursue. I am tired almost to death in struggling with the confusion of mind which is manifest in this confusion of terms, and I know that the fight is not yet fairly begun and that I shall die before it does begin.

Sincerely & gratefully Yours