I have received your kind note, with the several documents [relating to Kew Gardens] accompanying it, and which you were good enough to direct to me at London. I have read a portion of the papers with great pleasure and believe that they will have much weight in shaping the work we have in view in New York. I much regret that I did not sooner call upon you, and that I am unable at this time to avail myself of your generous disposition [by] studying the riches of Kew.

Since I left London I have visited Elvaston Castle, at which there is a most interesting collection of evergreens, arranged in a striking and beautiful manner; I have also visited a small place called Biddulph grange in North Staffordshire, in which there is a great deal of botanic and arboricultural beauty, quaintly arranged and with vast expenditure, upon a site naturally uninteresting, except in its distant views. These places I had been advised to visit, as exhibiting the art of landscape gardening in higher perfection than any other in England, and at each I was greatly delighted—but especially at Elvaston. Since then I have visited Trentham, the old park of Stoneleigh Abbey and the old park of Charlecourt; the last two being places which no one had advised me to study and of which, as of interest to a landscape gardener, I do not recollect to have read a word.

I am troubled by the condition of mind in which they leave me, and I venture to crave your patience in listening to its confession. I find that the simplicity without refinement of art, if indeed not without art, of Stoneleigh and Charlecourt, and the fine artistic simplicity of Trentham, give me a much greater pleasure, and that it seems to me far more worthy to be striven for than the beauty for which certainly much greater study, skill and labor has been expended at such places as Elvaston & Biddulph grange. Reflecting upon all that I have heard & seen during this short visit to England, it has seemed [to] me that the great addition to the resources of art in gardening which botanic adventure has recently secured, together with the reaction from the old simple formal fashion of gardening, and some recent counter reaction from a tendency of rude carelessness of arrangement (from which only a good instinct would save a student of Gilpin), is just now resulting very generally in a style of gardening in which the peculiar landscape beauty of old English places, & in which England excels all the world, is sacrificed to botanic beauty and variety and the interest of frequent contrasts & surprises.