I have just received yours of 12th inst. and as I am preparing to leave town for Washington you will please excuse an offhand and partial reply.

I have your map and letter but not the printed report in regard to the Berkeley grounds before me. I have no maps or memoranda of the topography or of my old plan.

There was an axial line in my plan extending from near the centre of the property toward the Golden Gate. There is a similar line in yours I think, but if so I doubt if the two lines correspond. Your line I judge is laid along the middle of a knoll or spur; mine through an adjoining valley. If so there is an obvious difference of motive between the two plans.

You seem, however, to think that your plan may be imagined to involve an unjustifiable departure from the natural picturesque ideal in Landscape Gardening. My impression is that if I were to make a plan under your instructions, (I mean to meet present requirements), for this situations, I should discard that ideal to a much greater degree than you have done. I think that you know my views in this respect. They are that the principles of English landscape gardening, which in this climate I am disposed to carry to a greater extreme than they have ever been carried in Europe, are out of place in the climate of California. I should seek to cover the ground mainly with anything [51] by which I could secure a simply inoffensive low tone; not unnatural, never suggesting death or constant labor to keep alive. I should consequently have much less of open space than you have; should have much less respect for the present minor natural features — for wherever you put foliage in broad dense bodies you obliterate the old nature as effectively as if you had laid it over with bricks and mortar. I should then concentrate brightness, cheerfulness and elegance on a few plainly artificial elements, such as terraces, avenues and parterres, strictly formal and as unquestionably artificial as a necklace or a bracelet. You do less in this way than I should wish to do.

But you know that I should submit my views with great respect for the immeasureable advantage that you have gained in your much longer, closer, more special and practical study of the conditions in question in their bearing upon our common art.

Please present my compliments to President Gilman and if he, or any other gentleman interested should have any doubt what my judgement would be in the point in question, I should be glad to have you show him this hasty letter — or, better, tell him from me that I could not be as bold as you in attempting English lawn effects in the climate of California, except in the smallest scale, as I might here plant a side garden of camelias, myrtles and fuschias, but that I should wish to go much further than you propose to do in humble following of types which many centuries ago were enjoyed and accepted gratefully by artists in comparison with whom all now living are pygmies.