LAYING OUT OF GROUNDS 



paths, little by little, or year by year, without 

 reference, clear and constant, to the final re- 

 sults, and to a plan that shall embrace the 

 whole property, will involve great waste of la- 

 bor, and the inevitable undoing in the future 

 of what may be done to-day. Of course, where 

 such work is intrusted to a corps of garden- 

 ers and laborers, complete diagrams will be 

 necessary; and it is only where the constant 

 personal supervision of the director, whether 

 proprietor or other, can be counted on, that 

 such detailed exhibit of the work in hand can 

 be dispensed with. No general plan, such as 

 I refer to, can be safely matured without, first, 

 full and intimate knowledge of the ground and 

 its environs, and, second, a clear understand- 

 ing of the intentions and tastes of the pro- 

 prietor under whose occupancy the plan is to 

 reach fulfilment. 



I do not mean at all to say that the laws of 

 taste in respect to landscape art are to meet 

 revision at the will of any chance proprietor, 

 or that the art itself has not its elemental 

 principles which no occupant of a country es- 

 tate can safely disturb. But one landholder 

 has a penchant for agriculture, and wishes to 

 make all the available acres contribute to his 

 taste for cattle or crops; another has a horti- 



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