The villages in the Cotswold region to which I referred as well built were Camden, Broadway, and Middle Hill. I do not remember if I wrote you about our little tour in the Sherwood Forest, the Dukeries, Chatsworth, and Haddon Hall. Briefly, I enjoyed the remains of the forest and the villages on its borders very much; was much pleased with Thoresby; enjoyed Haddon Hall; enjoyed the more unsophisticated scenery of Derbyshire greatly, including the bleak heathery moorland; enjoyed the park at Chatsworth, did not like the terrace but found, notwithstanding some bad anomalies, the results of Paxton’s [565]work in the pleasure grounds more agreeably interesting than I had in some way been led to suppose or than I remembered them. I suppose this is the result of growth. Justice can often not be done a landscape gardener’s design in less than fifty years after the work has been initiated. Nor then or ever, unless it has been in the hands of one in sympathy with Nature.

Reviewing all that I have seen in England, it appears to me that the selection and disposition of trees and plants, the modeling of surfaces and the arrangement of roads and walks and architectural conveniences, with a view to pleasing general effects of scenery, have been of late much confused and often lost sight of in efforts to provide brilliant local spectacles, to display rarities, curiosities and luxuries of vegetation, and to exhibit masterpieces of horticultural craft and costly garden bric-a-brac. Vast numbers of trees have been planted without knowledge or soundly formed anticipations of what they will become. Many of them are failing, and many that are not failing are conspicuously offensive, because of their unfitness to combine with the native elements of English scenery. Since my earlier visits the country has lost something of picturesque interest, mainly, I think, through agricultural and economical improvements, but a little, I am inclined to think, because of some slight and probably temporary turn of public sentiment toward prosaic neatness and formality.

Since my last visit there has been a decided abatement of the bedding-out nuisance and of all the garish and childish fashions that came in with it. The gardeners and others with whom I have talked have been generally conceding—some with evident regret—that it was going out of fashion. Any who think that with it their occupation will be gone had better come quickly to America, where all the beauty that I have been aiming to provide on various grounds is wholly put out of countenance by it. There has never been a square yard of bedding out on any ground under my direction.