Yours of 9th just received. Don’t show my memorandum letter — of 6th. I have written Mr Bowen.

You don’t tell me that you have moved the pines. You promised to do so immediately when I was with you and to write me of your progress from week to week.

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Now you must not allow anything else to stand in the least in the way of the planting and shore work.

Take the risk and bear the blame of something else’s going wrong. You can do your professional duty and, if necessary, offend the public and the Commission, who never can & never will know the need of it.

It is no disgrace to the Commissioners that they do not understand our business and mismanage it, it is a disgrace to us if we neglect or allow ourselves to be driven from it year after year and nobody has a right to compel us to disgrace ourselves. A Superintendent is a man exercising discretion for others. Take the largest discretion and let the results justify you.

Have the leeward shore of the lake put in the best shape possible early this fall, if you neglect wholly everything else. You can steal material from other parts of the park less prominent in landscape, less marred by hasty work and less difficult to make satisfactory.

Remember it was that bit of all your work which needed to be done before all others with the greatest amount of personal care and steady refinement and artifice and it is the last to be properly taken hold of.

You can take out a third of the shrubs along the drive from the Parkway to the bridge and with good management the park will be no worse three years hence for the thinning & setting back. Almost everywhere the shrubs are too near the edge of the drive; the large ones should be removed & smaller ones, or creepers and broader margins of turf substituted.

If you lack low shrubs you can raise them and replant in another year or two but at any rate crowd the leeward bank of the lake and by every means that can be contrived force out a low thicket which the wind cannot prevent from becoming strong, overhanging, picturesque & varied in form, with light and playful spray and which shall give a fine, soft, natural, mysterious and poetic quality to this most prominent feature of all the park in place of the bare, lumpy, bald shorn, machine shaped character which is now fixed upon it.