Autobiographical Passages 63 



years old tad entered my mind of practicing landscape gar- 

 dening except as any fairly well-to-do, working farmer may, 

 and in flower gardening or of any kind of decorative or simply 

 ornamental gardening — any gardening other than such as I 

 have indicated — I was far from being an adept. 



But I gradually came to be known among my neighbors 

 and friends as a man of some special knowledge, inventive- 

 ness and judgment in such affairs as I have mentioned, and 

 to be called on for advice about them. At length, growing 

 out of such little repute, I was unexpectedly invited to take 

 a modest public duty and from this by promotions and 

 successive unpremeditated steps was later led to make 

 Landscape Architecture my calling in life. , . . 



I have since, partly on professional and partly on other 

 occasions, continued to travel a great deal. . . . But a 

 small part of my journeyings either in the old or the new 

 world have been made by railways. I have traveled several 

 thousand miles on foot and several thousand in the saddle 

 and I have had rare opportunities for seeing people of all 

 sorts in all parts of our land in their homes. 



All the time interest in scenery, landscape, landscape 

 architecture, has been strong with me. 



Through these causes and because of the interest I have 

 thus explained I have been much led into pointed conversa- 

 tions with men and women under a great variety of circum- 

 stances, while looking about their abodes or while following 

 their chosen paths, roads and waters, with regard to the 

 pleasure to be had in doing so and with direct reference to 

 means of enhancing it or getting the better of circumstances 

 restricting it. 



