PREFACE 



of the woild w ai- to-day ; and the author presumes to make no complaint 

 of the comparatively insignificant misfortune which has come to him. 

 The manuscript will l)e prepared anew with the reassuring thought that 

 such complete recapitulation of the material will afford opportunity of 

 revision granted few writers, and will imquestionably conduce to the 

 improvement and strengthening of the text. 



TO CITY FATHERS, PARK SUPERINTENDENTS, LANDSCAPE DESIGNERS, AND 

 TO ALL THOSE WHO ENJOY AND DESIRE PARKS 



The present volume on Park Design is addressed primarily and 

 respectfully to executives having the development of parks in charge. 

 Such officials are usually business men whose point of view is 

 naturally so practical as to be one-sided; and by the time they have 

 acquired a sympathetic knowledge of the subject to the point of ex- 

 changing a watch-dog attitude for a j)i'ogressive one of city advance- 

 ment, their term expires and new recruits take their places. This 

 results in a wasteful dissipation of time and energy on the part of the 

 landscape architect or park designer directly in charge of the work, 

 who is constantly forced to go over again and again fundamental prin- 

 ciples of park design that may be demonstrated with greater economy 

 of effort by means of some book of general instruction on the subject. 

 Many of a designer's best projects are hampered and often frustrated 

 by the difficulty of those in authority, through general unfamiliarity 

 with the context and with the underlying principles of the subject, to 

 understand and fully visualize the designs prepared. 



Park administrators, through lack of available information and in 

 company with the great majority of people who are still unappreciative 

 of the progress that has been made in the art, seem to underestimate 

 the value of design in park building, if not prone to doubt the existence 

 or necessity of it at all; and there is required really what would be 

 comparable in university curriculums to an elementary course of in- 



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