IXbe %ain0 <S>ut of a parfe or Estate 49 



exercise of taste and artistic skill that its cost cannot 

 be foreseen any more than that of a painting. Experi- 

 ments can hardly be avoided, and experiments cost 

 money. 



The initial trouble met by anyone proposing to lay 

 out a place is the difficulty of foreseeing how his ideas 

 will look in the future. Experience in the behaviour 

 of different soils and plants in different situations and 

 a natural genius can alone enable one to form a picture 

 in the mind of how a piece of landscape gardening will 

 look ten or twenty years hence. One tree will grow 

 more rapidly in this place than in that one, and in 

 many places unforeseen results will necessarily occur, 

 but something of the real nature of these trees should 

 be realized beforehand, so as to be able to see the 

 picture somewhat in the way it will look years hence. 



"One can see from this how unwise it is to invite 

 a strange artist for some days or weeks or even months 

 with the view of making a plan in which every road 

 and every plantation, the commanding features and 

 all the details, are exactly fixed. And worse still 

 to send such a person merely a survey of the place 

 so that he may proceed at once with a plan, when he 

 has no feeling of the character of the region, no 

 knowledge of the localities, of the effects of hill and 

 dale, of high or low trees in the immediate fore- 

 ground or in the distance, for him to draw on sub- 

 missive paper his lines, which no doubt may look 

 very pretty and good there, but which realized into 



