The successful pursuit of Landscape Gardening, like all other liberal arts, depends upon a thorough understanding of results, and no work of excellence can be perfected without a close and careful study, in advance, of all its details and effects. The assistance derived from the compilation of a design on paper is of great value, for the reason that one is enabled to secure suggestive beauties, harmonize them, and reject features that are not desirable, as well as to investigate the practicability or impracticability of the mechanical work necessary. How often do we hear stated, If I were to do this thing again, it should be managed in another way; that difficulty did not present itself until the work was nearly done, and it was too late to remedy it. It did not occur to us that we might have so located that road, the barn, the garden; in fact, made every thing far more beautiful, infinitely more convenient, and for about one half of the expense. We see our mistake now, but the deed is done.

What might have been studied out on paper, where all blunders could easily have been remedied, has been actually executed in real materials and at a heavy cost, and thus the would-be amateur takes his first lesson in Design. Experience is a dear school, but some people will persist in being educated there.

No sensible man would presume to build a house without a well-considered plan, and for the reason, that it enables him to study out and combine the principles of economy, convenience, and beauty, and by no other process can he reach or approach completeness in these desirable features. Now a well-contrived house is one that requires the least possible amount of labor to keep it unexceptionably neat; and there is that difference in houses of precisely the same class and accommodation that makes it necessary, in one case, to have double the number of servants of the other to keep them in like order. All experience proves that in the hands of real talent, whether amateur or professional, a plan enables one to so contrive his house that he shall get the full limit of accommodation for his money, the most convenience for his family, and put the same in a well-proportioned and attractive form, and that time is well spent which is devoted to a thorough compilation and revision of a plan of construction. Even if paid for at an over extravagant rate, it is but a mere bagatelle of its value. Intelligent men understand architectural and mechanical construction from a plan.

They know that the work of the architect, the engineer, the painter, the sculptor, the composer, etc., etc., can only be successfully reached through the medium of carefully studied plans. They are the great stepping stones to success in all the arts, and essentially so in that of landscape embellishment. Great paintings do not spring at once from an artist's brain, but only through a succession of plans; every effect of color, costume, expression, position, etc., is separately studied with labored care, and the finished work in marble has in parts, and as a whole, been moulded and studied in the plastic clay.

The value of plans in all departments of landscape embellishment is but imper. fectly understood; popular impressions are, that they can not be made, and the less one knows about them the louder he is in their condemnation. As a medium of communication between the brain that conceives and the hand that executes they save a world of talk and time, for practical working drawings should tell their own story so plain as not to admit of a misunderstanding, and when placed in the hands of a workman he comprehends at once his duty; there is then no hesitation as to how he shall act, he wastes no time in asking questions, and gives himself no anxiety about the result. He has had communicated to him the exact manner of construction, the materials, and the relations they bear to each other, and in a language clear and concise, compared with which words written or expressed become as nothing.

Intelligent proprietors who seek fine effects with the least expenditure can readily understand the advantage of studying plans, for it is a well-known fact, that the arts of design, in some of their varied applications, afford the power of expressing on paper every stage of progress in the execution of any work of art, and that the whole process of arrangement, its utility, convenience, and harmony, can be traced step by step through all its combinations.

It is quite necessary to adopt some system in carrying forward improvements, so that they shall occupy those places in which they will be of the most value, and that they be constructed in the most advantageous manner. To know what one wants when improvements are undertaken is to know a great deal; to communicate those wants to others requires that one should first understand them-thoroughly; to understand them thoroughly it is necessary to study their various developments, from the first conception to the practical working reality, and to do this successfully and economically there is no such medium as a plan.

There is precisely the same reason why one should prepare a plan of his grounds as he should of his house. There is a convenience as well as a beauty of arrangement to be reached by study, and an inconvenience as well as a constant addition of labor always attendant upon a work of chance. If we refer to those country seats, or farms, or estates which are the most successful, both artistically and financially, we shall find that the whole process of their improvement was thoroughly systematic, and the same is true of any work of art, or, indeed, of any business in life.

The two most prominent professional authors of England on this subject, Repton and Loudon, placed the utmost importance on the value of plans, and their great successes were mainly attributable to them. Repton made drawings of every thing he devised, and Loudon's published works are profuse in illustrations; his isomet-rical perspective drawings are evidence of the extent to which he carried, and the value which he placed on, this important accessory to a profession of which he was an acknowledged leader.