American Landscape Gardening 129 



grounds in which the convenience and probable wants of 

 but a single family and its selected guests were to be con- 

 sidered, a good design for which is a very different thing from 

 good design for grounds in which the movements of many 

 thousands are to be provided for and precautions taken not 

 only against careless and erratic movements but against 

 occasional malevolent torrents of a disorderly rabble. 



Of the thirty-fotu- plans of so many assumed landscape 

 gardeners offered to Commissioners of the Central Park in 

 1857, but one made the slightest provision for requirements 

 which everyone now sees it was absolutely necessary should 

 be provided for. If any one of the others had been adopted 

 an almost complete reconstruction of the Park would before 

 this time have been necessary. Among the plans offered, 

 that which, from the opportunities and well-earned reputa- 

 tion of the planner, I had expected to be the best, aimed at 

 nothing more than a connected and diversified series of 

 effects appropriate to confined private suburban pleasure 

 grounds. 



Of twenty-two plans obtained ten years ago by the Boston 

 Park Commissioners — several of which had cost the planners 

 over a thousand dollars each, and were most painstakingly 

 studied — even that which they adjudged to be the best was 

 after a few months entirely abandoned. (They finally came 

 to me for a plan which when published was bitterly de- 

 nounced, declared publicly, by an alleged landscape gardener 

 of large experience, wholly impracticable and so held up to 

 scorn that an association of citizens — large property holders 

 — privately employed a civil engineer to professionally ex- 

 amine and report upon it. It has been carried out with no 

 essential variation and all objections have fallen to the 

 ground.) 



I have WTitten all the foregoing to justify the opinion I 

 now give you that in all Europe and America, among all the 

 men who with no dishonest intention take the name of land- 

 scape gardeners (or architects) there are very few who have 



