1 6 Hints on Landscape Gardening 



dertaken from pure caprice it would certainly be 

 best never to have alterations for improvement, 

 in general the dictum, nonum prematur in annum, 

 holds good. One must never rest with correcting 

 and refining until the best possible results have 

 been attained ; a principle never to be relinquished 

 and which oftentimes alone proves to be the great 

 teacher.' 



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 com- 

 manding features and all the details, are exactly 

 Jixed; and worse still, to send such a person 

 merely a survey of the place, he having no knowl- 

 edge of the character of the region, of the effects 

 of hill and dale, of high or low trees in the im- 

 mediate foreground or in the distance, so that he 

 may proceed at once to draw on submissive paper 

 his lines, which, no doubt, may look very pretty 

 and well there, but which realized into facts are 

 bound to achieve at best an inappropriate and 

 unsatisfactory design. One who intends to build 

 up a landscape must do so out of the actual ma- 



' Some years ago, when I was showing my place to a lady of intel- 

 ligence and understanding, she modestly remarked that she understood 

 but little of the matter ; that she could call to mind many more pic- 

 turesque, grandiose places than mine, but that here, with the general 

 impression of quietness and simplicity, something new appealed to her at 

 every turn. No remark could have been more flattering to me, and if 

 her opinion is well founded I may consider my work truly successful, 

 a result which may be attributed largely to the two principles followed: 

 to have one main idea, and yet never to allow any feature to remain 

 which had proved in any way to be a Siilure. 



