After you left John and I went on to St Paul’s and there I had to keep my bed, a medicus visiting me twice a day, for a week. I could only see the Park Commissioners in my room, John going about with them in the field. I am here now trying to pick up enough to go on with the work that is waiting for me at Brookline. This illness has set me forward a distinct notch in old age. And the consciousness of it makes me the more anxious to have you advance professionally before I go. The value of your patrimony is to lie in your ability to gradually qualify yourself to advance the work that I am soon to wholly drop. I have been looking out to give you every advantage I could for this. It is the unavoidable thought of the old man: “Could I have started with anything like the advantage, general and special, that I can give my son, I should have acquitted myself so much better.” “Let me spare my son the difficulties that I have had.” But I know that if I had been specially educated and trained for my profession, I should not have been able to try as hard as I did to get the better of my difficulties; should not have been disposed to try. Really I did go into my work with the spirit of an over-ardent volunteer; reckless of health; reckless of life, so I could meet my responsibility. Thank God you will not have to move in this way; it is too costly. But I am always thinking that you will have to [804]make up by deliberate and methodical methods for what you will lack of such impulse, ardor and devotion. In guiding your education, more especially your out-of-school education, through traveling and social influences, I have had the fact much in mind that most of the men who have thus far been at all notable in the practice of our art, have jumped into it, as I did, without adequate special education, and I have wanted as far as I could to make you exceptional. Kent was a carriage painter, then a landscape painter and sculptor; he could have been little more than a dabbler at anything. He had no horticultural education, was simply a loose artist. He fell, at length, into his place, by accident. Repton’s case was essentially similar; he was bred a merchant, was an amateur painter, was always a blundering amateur of architecture, jumped suddenly into the practice of landscape gardening, very much unprepared. Downing was brought up a nursery man—a very bad school for art. Of our contemporaries, Weidenman was a surveyor primarily. Bowditch was educated a Sanitary Engineer and is still that more than anything else. I cannot think of a man who has attained distinction in our profession who has had any methodical & systematic training for it, or who has not been shunted into it from another calling. I directed John’s early education with the idea that he would be a physician. This even in the Scientific School. I have used my best judgment to have you trained from the start as a Landscape Architect with a liberal general education to base your special training upon.

I have been in doubt whether it was wise to accept cousin Frank’s invitation for you this summer. The chance of your advancing professionally has hardly seemed enough to justify the excursus. I have been reconciling myself to it by the consideration that if you could stand hard physical work at a high elevation it would probably strengthen your constitution and toughen you at some points where I am weak & you are likely to have inherited weakness; that the experience would be a fine rebound from your confined life of late years, &c. But, reading your letters, it seems to me that you really must be getting good professional nutriment; you must be gaining much in topographical common sense. I think that you must know what I mean. You have probably heard me grumble at the wooden, mechanical, laborious school-method which I have found surveyors and engineers obliged to follow in order to approach conclusions that they ought to be able to jump to by an unconscious leap. You are having good opportunities of training yourself in tact and skill for ready, off-hand reconnoitering and estimating by half-guess work—for mental habits in this way and mental habits that grow up with it, which are invaluable in our profession. What I have of them has often enabled me to lead and correct trained surveyors. But it is not in this way alone that you now have opportunity to advance yourself professionally. All practice will be of much future value which you can have to train yourself in habit of estimating distances, angles, especially vertical angles and rates of grade, when you can afterwards have means of measuring your success with instruments or reference to maps. Acquire the habit of guessing at distances—distances of objects that you are [805]approaching, and especially when you can apply the test of pacing. Acquire the habit of pacing accurately. Pick up all the woodcraft that you can, such as keeping knowledge of the points of compass when you are pursuing a devious course; of not getting “turned round,” of not getting confused in timber, of following a trail, finding springs and guessing out the lines of water courses, or the means of natural drainage; of seeing by the shape of mountain heights which way streams between them are trending &c &c. All the knack that I gained by my Texas experience in this way has been professionally useful to me. All the practice which you can manage to get (without neglecting your duties proper to the Expedition) will be educational—more so than the time given to it, could be if given to anything that a lawyer-student could pick up in a Law School or a Surveyor in the buildings of the Technological Institute. All such practice will be educational with reference to the practice of our profession and none the less will you find it so if, during your apprenticeship, you find little occasion to use it. It has been a continuous surprise to me in all my professional life, even to this time, to find that I have occasion to revert to knowledge, reflections, experiences and instructions which first came to me as it were accidentally, but really incidentally in my early life, and the value of which with reference to my future life I then had no thought of. There was a little book that I bought in London last year on rapid military surveying or reconnoitring which I wanted to send you, but having looked through all your books as well as the various divisions of our library I can’t find it. I hope that you have it. I believe I had two copies of it and {if} it turns up on further search of the office I will send it, for I should like Frank to see it as well as you. Not that Frank wd learn anything from it but it would give him some idea of the sort of practice in which I would like to have you gain some experience; as indeed, I judge from your letters that you are.

I finish this letter at Brookline. I came back from Deer Isle conveying Marion and Jenny; mother has gone to Cummington to attend a Bryant festival. John went off very suddenly to Europe, having no conference about it with me, which I regret, as I think, I could have helped him, and I am left in perplexity as to some points of our business as to which it would have been better that I had got from him such posting up as I feel myself to require. I gained something in health at Deer Isle; at least am able {to sleep} more before daylight, and am feeling a little less delapidated.

Write me as soon as you well can at what time you will be coming East. I may wish to meet you at Chicago. I may wish you to come back southwardly and meet me at Biltmore, prepared to stay there. All depends on the time of your return. Have it in view at any rate to return by a different route from that upon which you went out. The more you see—the more parts of our country and the more varied topographical and climatic conditions you have opportunity to carefully observe even from car windows, the larger will be your professional capital.

I need not say that the great puzzle of our profession for the future, [806]for your period, is going to be how to deal satisfactorily with the difficulties of the more arid parts of our continent. The ideas of landscape architecture that apply to Northern Europe apply to nothing west of Missouri and to hardly anything South of Pennsylvania. This because elastic turf is an essential element of these ideas and the moment that we pass beyond regions in which permanent turf is practicable—turf to be walked upon, and on a scale too large for watering—we don’t know what to do. Satisfactory domestic conditions require turf—certainly require conditions of foreground foliage which are not found naturally occurring in two thirds of the United States; namely in “the Great West” and most of “the South.”

I advised both Codman and Eliot to go to Spain, Southern France & Italy, to try to get new light on this difficulty and they did so; Codman going even over to the African coast for this reason but neither of them gained much of anything toward solving of the problem. I have some principles by which I have been guided in the little professional work that I have done but I have had no opportunity of working out anything in practice; nor has anything been done honestly on my advice. Those whom I have attempted to guide have bolted. The general result is that I have never seen anything on a large scale in Landscape work in the parts of our country where permanent greensward is not natural, that was at all satisfactory. You may as well be thinking of this with a view to grounding yourself on the difficulty—on the data of the problem. The main question is how can we make foregrounds of domestic landscape satisfactory consistently with convenience and without going to extravagant expense? In the arid regions I have never seen it done. If you get to Denver and can call on Roberts and go to the neighborhood we tried to lay out for his company, I should like to have you; especially if you can take photographs of the “improved” parts of it—more especially the “Lake” and its shores. It is an essay—our design is—to apply sound principles to the situation in a small way but I am almost certain that it has been badly botched and that the result would be most unsatisfactory to me. It is the only work that we have done, except at Palo Alto, in which we have attempted to wrestle at all with the class of conditions in question; and at Palo Alto, you know how we were served, were forced to resign to avoid responsibility for what was done. It is not improbable that the principle field for originality in our profession for what may be called a new school of L.A., will be found in the future, just where you are. The main point of the problem will be the contrivance of materials for foregrounds, strong and fresh, and harmonious and melodic, and all this consistently with convenience, economy and suitability to nice domestic life. The man who can best accomplish this in Colorado, will be at the head of his profession. I need hardly tell you that evy moment that you can give to local botanical study is sure to turn out to have been of value to you. Of value practically, professionally, not only with reference to professional work in the arid region, but here and everywhere that you may have such work to do. Any knowledge of plants [807]that you may acquire is sure to be useful; if not otherwise, simply as putting you on a better footing for conference and conversation with those better informed. There is little that I regret so much from a professional point of view, as that I did not in my earlier travels acquire more botanical and arboricultural knowledge—did not observe more accurately, particularly and assiduously, as I certainly should have done if I had been able to acquire even such preliminary botanical knowledge as you have.

Don’t imagine that I write on the supposition that you are your own master and not well occupied with duties. It is the possible incidental opportunities of professional education that I am thinking of. Everything that I knew applicable to my profession before, when I was 36 years old, I began the Central Park work, had been gained incidentally and accidentally to other occupations, because of an active receptive disposition and an unconscious disposition to make the most of my opportunities incidentally in the right direction. Such is the education I want you to be getting this summer.

Affectionately

Brookline, 7th August 1894. This is postscriptum of my note to you begun at Deer Isle 1st inst. Marion is here with me; Mother is at Cummington, assisting Miss Bryant at the Bryant festival. We read today of the arrival of the Lucania, with John—or rather of her passing into the channel. I have today recvd your note of 1st August, mainly relating to tents. If my scheme for you at Biltmore is pursued all you will need there is a place for sleeping outside the house in which you will live, and this in winter—at least that is as far as I am looking ahead. What Frank is suggesting would be more elaborate than is necessary and much too costly. Your old tent at Deer Isle was at night the bed room of the Bryant boys, and by day was my library or writing room. Possibly when I go again to Biltmore, matters will be changed and I shall change my plans and a tent will not be required. I shall aim to place you under the most favorable conditions for gaining a familiar knowledge of plants, and perhaps for the winter it will be better for you to live near the nursery. Still you cannot learn much in the winter from the nursery. Possibly I shall conclude that you can use the winter better. But certainly I shd like to have you at Biltmore during the autumn and I should also think it best that you have to do in some active way with the planting of the Arboretum which I hope that we may be able to begin next Fall; or at any rate during the winter. The full planting of it will be more than one year’s work. You see that, feeling that I have but a slight hold on life, I am anxious to use any advantage that I may have for getting you established favorably in relation to that undertaking. The time may come when the fact of your having been engaged from the start in the planting of it (and all that will go with the planting of it) will give you some prestige. At [808]least you should be able to refer to it authoritatively, as having been “a part” of the planting of it—thus implying a thorough understanding of it. If it realizes my hopes it will, in your probable lifetime, become celebrated and the planting of it be regarded as a historical event. But mainly I am thinking that having tangibly to do with the trees, arranging them, handling them, you would get certain knowledge about them stamped more firmly in your mind than by any direct study in a nursery or in an Arboretum fully formed. I have just receivd, while writing this page a report from Gall which indicates that the road construction & other preparatory work is advancing as I have planned and that the enterprise will have advanced a distinct stage before October. I would like to have you assist at the planting of the first tree. I shall get Prof Sargent to hold it if I can.