Mr. William Platt, by whom this letter will be brought you, is a recent graduate of Harvard College. In vacations and holidays he has given a good deal of time to reading upon matters of our profession, and to such study as was practicable in the Arnold Arboretum under the guidance of Mr. Jack, whose intimate household friend he is. He early obtained your book and having an opportunity to travel this Summer in Italy, as an assistant to his brother, who is a landscape painter and etcher, he has said that he would be glad if he could, when passing through Paris, without intruding upon your time, have an opportunity of simply paying his respects to you. We cordially commend him to your friendly regard. He wishes to enter our office as a pupil, on his return.

I have gratefully received kind messages from you through Professor [475]Sargent, and Mrs. Sargent has told me of the pleasure she had in meeting you and your family. She speaks with enthusiasm of her enjoyment of Paris.

What I now chiefly wish to hear from you, my good friend, is that we may hope to welcome you and your wife here next year. I say next year, because there will be a good deal to see at the Columbian Exposition, in the preparation of which, we, as its Landscape Architects, have an important, exacting, difficult and most laborious part. But I do not mean in the horticultural department, or that of verdant decoration, that there will be anything of special interest to you, except, perhaps, what shall be found the outcome of expedients with which we are aiming to get a not altogether unseemly result out of very unfavorable circumstances.

You know, perhaps, that the site was selected on our advice. The several sites available were all most unpromising. You will remember the bare, flat, treeless, water-logged, heavy clay prairie, west, north and south of the town. The site that we advised was lower, wetter and of poorer soil than any of the others. Our argument for it was simply that it was bordered by the Lake, the only natural feature of scenery of interest near the city. Our plan calls for canals and basins to be excavated, the material lifted from them to be spread so as to give elevation above the natural swamp level, to the sites for the buildings. The chief difficulty oppressing us lies in the fact that the level of the water is very fluctuating and that it cannot be foreseen within several feet what its average elevation will be in 1893. Our method of meeting this difficulty, where the banks are not to have terrace walls, is to plant willow cuttings closely, with other such aquatic and semi-aquatic plants, (such as Junci, Typhas, Nymphaeas and Irises,) as we can hope will flourish if their roots are left for some time dry, or for some time submerged. We are making several miles of such shore, taking all precautions that occur to us as possible to guard the planting from being lifted and carried off, or from being crushed by the heavy ice forming in the Winter and to be crowded upon the shore in the storms of the Spring. There is one grove of poor, stunted and more or less dilapidated, small Oaks, which, with some thinning and trimming off of dead wood, we retain as the core of an island center-piece. Outside of this we plant trees taken from the forest, also a considerable number which have been growing from saplings, set on the property by the Park Commissioners (you remember Mr. Paul Cornell, who was one of them) ten to fifteen years ago. Of the class of trees that you would have for the terraces, not one is to be obtained in Chicago, and we shall not attempt to get any of the few that we might find in distant cities, because there would not be enough to produce effects of composition and the cost would be excessive. We may, however, obtain something for tub-planting on the terraces from Florida or California—Oranges from the orchards and Palmettoes from the swamps.

You know that the term Landscape Architect, which I have used as the name of my profession for more than thirty years, is sometimes caviled at and ridiculed here, and more in England, as by Robinson in the Garden. It [476]seems to be assumed that it properly applies only to formal gardening, and, while I repudiate this notion, I have supposed that its French equivalent,—Architecte Paysagiste,—had come down to you by direct descent from Le Notre, or an earlier time. Wishing to say a word on this subject, I was surprised to find that while naval architecture and hydraulic architecture are recognized as established French terms in Littré’s Dictionary, landscape architecture is not mentioned. Can you imagine why, and can you tell me if the term is of recent introduction and to be considered in the least as still on probation?

I am, dear Mr André,

Always faithfully Yours,