I have just received your favor of the 30th ulto.

I believe that the word exotic is something more than a synonym of foreign or strange“it carries a sense of unnatural, out of harmony with local natural conditions. If so, you take for granted the sole point to which the argument of my last letter was directed. If the attention of more than one in ten or fifty thousand, and that one other than a botanist, is to be supposed divertible in the slightest degree from the landscape as a whole by the plants I have named and stand for more than by those you stand for, my advocacy of them falls to the ground. Does the occurrence of the little red or yellow clover or the buttercups in the pastures of Walpole or the barberry on the hills of Andover distract attention from the loveliness of the Connecticut or the Merrimac vallies?

I go with you and beyond you on the line of your argument, for I have no doubt at all about the misfortune of the profile, and stand ready to contribute to blow its nose off with gunpowder without waiting for an earthquake. That is precisely what landscape gardening should do I think, make improvements by design which nature might by chance make through the action of earthquakes, storms, frosts, birds and insects.

(I have this in print, and will send it to you if I can get a copy of my paper.)

I fully endorse every word you say, except that I am not disposed to regard the trumpet creeper as necessarily a permanent exotic in the White Hills, and should not wait to be sure that it had found its way there by chance already before using it as a very valuable means of preventing the railroad from doing the scenery an injury.