American Landscape Gardening 127 



have been addressing a commissioner of 1858, had there been 

 park boards at that time outside of New York City. 



With reference to your undertaking there is less room for 

 choice than may be supposed among the landscape gardeners 

 or landscape architects of the country. (I have come to 

 prefer the latter term, tho' I much objected to it when it was 

 first given me. I prefer it because it helps to established the 

 important idea of the distinction of my profession from that 

 of gardening, as that of architecture from building — the 

 distinction of an art of design.) 



Of those who have given themselves the title of landscape 

 gardeners not one of many more than a hundred have the 

 smallest right to it. As a rule they are further from it 

 than the average citizen of fair general education. This be- 

 cause the most of them have passed the best educational 

 years of their lives in close and toilsome confinement to 

 matters horticultural, botanical and on a small scale decora- 

 tive, pursuing a course in this and other respects in which 

 faculties of close observation and handicraft skill are culti- 

 vated. A course in fact such as you might prescribe for a 

 patient whom you wished to wean from too great suscepti- 

 bility to and interest in grasses, bushes and trees as compo- 

 nents oj natural scenery. The gardening to which they apply 

 the term landscape is just that, in its essence, which the 

 term landscape gardening was first used as a means to rule 

 out of view. 



Hamerton in his treatise of Landscape says that "scape" 

 in this word was from the same root and properly has the 

 same significance with ship, e. g. in friendship — meaning, 

 that is to say, the comprehensive state, to the eye, of the land 

 or region to which it is applied. (I should rather say the 

 character, broadly considered, of the scenery of a region.) 

 Of late the training of gardeners has been not at all to land- 

 scape in this sense but to elements, incidents and features of 

 the materials of landscape considered by themselves; to make 



