Yours of 17th ulto was duly recvd & I should have replied to it sooner but that I have had to be away from home.

If I had to consult solely my own judgmnt, (taste, sense of fitness and practicable ideals) I should have no landscape gardening, no composition, grouping or display of foliage effects on your moraine place at all. I should have dense forest right up to & about the house, with only such breaks and openings as would come of themselves in seeking convenience and comfort in roads, walks, house-garden, lawn, yards, and the walls, hedges, thickets, stairways & out-structures. As a matter of comfort and propriety I would seclude the lawn &c from the road, the thicket for this purpose serving as a wind-break from the chilly N.W. wind; I would guard against trees growing up where they would keep the morning sun from the house, lawn & terrace, and I would decorate the artificial features of the house wall & lawn with bushes & vines. As the trees grew up, I would thin them out, with a little more care to develop beauty of individuals, groups & masses to be seen from the house than in ordinary commercial forestry but with equal care to avoid suggesting a lawn or park or any effort & study for the purpose. I would use no sythe, broom or rake on this side and if this left the ground forlorn, would scatter about low bushes, vines and creepers enough to screen it.

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I would dispense with all views to the westward from the house except into or, for the front, over, the wood, and would have a stranger arrive and enter the house without a suspicion of the broad & extended views in its East & South outlooks; the unexpectedness of these and the strong contrast of character in all detail & scenery of the domestic and confidential lawn & terrace with that of the carriage, public, woodland, stable & kitchen sides of the house being its most striking distinction from the common run of villas & country seats.

As I could never get you to quite fully accept or even Sargent to approve of this idea I suppose I must consider it extreme to the point of offensive eccentricity. Then the question is, how much dilution of common-place is necessary? Suppose the wood as it exists about your stable extended over the house site, there being several hundred trees from five to fifty years old to the acre. What would you cut out? Having in view the expanse from N.E. to S.W. from the terrace & lawn, what openings on the other side would you feel bound to make? I send a skeleton map with suggestions in pencil for groups of park-like treatment, leaving from 100 to 150 feet in which sufficient light would fall on the ground to allow a fair close turf to be maintained. If this would be so far satisfactory (all beyond to the West & N. West being close-planted forest), I will if you wish send a detailed planting map. (I should use chiefly elms & bass wood with a view to rapid lofty growth grouping with the house, in views of it from the E., North & South).

Between the lawn & the approach road AAA I should aim at an impervious thicket of small trees, as horn beam, hop-horn, dogwood, white birch, laburnums, Kohlreuteria, sassafras, mountain ash, moose wood &c. faced with bushy shrubs, and on the lawn side I would bring this thicket to a regular formal hedge of hornbeam, or if you prefer something more delicate or elegant, of privet, buckthorn or Cydonia Japonica. If, however, you want more of proper shrubbery than the few groups required for furnishing the lawn or than could be consistently introduced in the wild garden below the terrace, then I would make the garden face of this thicket (AAA) the shrubbery.

The points to be guarded are (1) that the house shall seem in approaching it from Beverly to be standing in the midst or on the edge of a wild forest, (2) that nothing shall be seen of the Eastern outlook or of the lawn or finished ground from the approach (3) that the lawn, terrace & the part of the house opening upon them shall appear all one affair, refined, domestic and sharply seperated, secluded and distinct in quality from everything else in the vicinity. So that in going or looking from it, you will seem to be everywhere going or looking into an outer world.

I write & send you the map that you may return the latter with a more definite statement of what you feel to be desirable, when I will fill it out sufficiently for working purposes.