I have recommended you for the position of Landscape Gardener to the Park Commission of San Francisco, am asked to ascertain your disposition in the matter.

The parks are large—each of several hundred acres—and lie between the city and the ocean, one of them reaching to the beach and being partly composed of drifting sands, the progress of which Mr Hall the Engineer in Superintendence is successfully arresting. The site with the climate [116] renders a park, strictly so called, impossible (in my judgement). There is no turf—can be none except under artificial watering—and trees grow only in low thickets. But a very large range of low shrubs, vines and herbaceous plants grow, if properly cared for, with extreme luxurience. The summers are dry, cool and harsh; the winters very mild and agreeable, water seldom if ever freezing.

The general plan is established and roads built upon it. What is now wanted is an assistant to Mr Hall of special knowledge for dealing with plantations & glades. The detailed design of these needs to be, in my judgment, wholly original—as adapted to make the best of circumstances which no man would ever intelligently choose as suitable for a pleasure ground.

I have been led to recommend you because of your experience in W. Texas—an arid country,—and because of your disposition to travel out of beaten tracks and find new methods for new conditions. The pay would {be} $1500 per-annum in gold.

Supposing that you are otherwise favorably disposed, you should I think consider whether you can take up plans already formed by another man, and which you may feel to be imperfectly adapted to the official requirements of the situation and under his instructions, cordially aid in such developmnt of them as you find to be possible. One who cannot do this being, as I am instructed, to be carefully avoided.

I may add that having no personal acquaintence with Mr Hall, I judge from his correspondence & reports that he is a gentleman of ability and estimable character, and that he is well read in the literature of Gardening and I know that he enjoys in a very high degree the confidence and respect not only of his commission but of some of the best citizens of California.