I have received your note of 27th April with proofs, which I herewith return, I am sorry to say, in a mutilated condition.

Being dissatisfied with the original article furnished the Cyclopaedia, I hoped by extraction and insertion to shape an article that would be more to my mind. The result, because of my literary unskillfulness, being botchy, an editorial revision has been made. My manuscript not coming with the proof, [776]I am not sure for how much of the article as it now stands in type I am responsible. I judge, however, that the revision has been made under the influence of a doctrinal view which I think in the highest degree heretical.

The introductory definition, editorially inserted, limits the function of Landscape Architecture to the forming of “scenes.”

“The various details are subordinated to a characteristic effect of the scene as a whole.”

I suppose from this and other indications that in the editorial mind the word landscape in the term landscape gardening has the same meaning that it has in the term landscape painting. I believe that this is an historical mistake, and a mistake which is at the root of countless errors in practice. The term “landscape gardening” was introduced as a convenient means of distinguishing gardening applied with certain motives from “Italian,” “geometric,” “formal,” “architectural” gardening. So different was the purpose of landscape gardening that Horace Walpole and others refer to it not as a new school of an old art, but as a “new-born” art. The Italian gardening, the results of which are described by Mr. Platt, is no more landscape gardening in this original use of the term than genre painting is landscape painting.

The use of the word park, made editorially, with reference to the ground adjoining the garden at Fontainbleau, is not in accordance with English usage, and is liable to suggest to one brought up on English literature wholly wrong ideas of the scenery of this ground.

The common and popular use of the word park in America, as it has floated traditionally to us from old English springs, is shown by the idea which is conveyed in the work park-like. This, I apprehend to be as far as possible from the idea of scenery in the likeness of that of a French parc. Again, it is illustrated by the fact that in Colorado, for example, various places have been named parks on our Government maps. These names were first applied descriptively by the pioneer settlers and officially accepted and made proper names by the Government. Examples of them are “South Park,” “North Park,” “Smith’s Park,” and “Jones’s Park.” There are scores of them. In every case the designation park is applied to them because of their scenery and nothing else, and in every case their scenery has a certain resemblance to the characteristic scenery of an English park, and not the most distant resemblance to that of a French parc. They are invariably, as far as I have seen them, prairie-like spaces surrounded and interspersed with scattered trees and scattered groups and bodies of trees naturally and in some degree picturesquely disposed. Such scenery is distinctly antithetical to the scenery of a French parc as it is to the scenery of a Roman villa. But it was to the opening, improving and making more available to enjoyment of such English park scenery by Kent that the word landscape first came into use in connection with the word gardening, and any other use of it must be confusing to the general American public. Landscape gardening and English gardening have been used as synonymous terms.

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So far as the question I have been discussing is to be considered a literary question, I do not wish to appear to express my views in an authoritative manner, but simply to show that what I consider to be the editor’s point of view differs from that which I am in the habit of taking, and to point out the danger which this involves.

I do not like to attempt a definition. There are some terms of which any brief definition is liable to be misleading, and I have never found the meaning of the term landscape architecture or landscape gardening at all fairly expressed in one or two sentences. But, agreeing that an introductory definition is wanted, I offer the best that I can in a reasonably brief form, prefixing it to the proof sheets. This will show the ground of my protest against the editorial doctrine.

Yours Respectfully