With this ground plan before us we decided indoors where to plant what outdoors and calculated arithmetically the number of each sort of shrub we should need for the particular interval we designed that sort to fill. Our scheme of arrangement was a crescendo of foliage and flower effects, beginning on the fronts of the buildings and rising toward their rears, while at all points making more of foliage than of bloom, because the bloom shows for only a month or less, while the leaf remains for seven or more. Beginning thus with our quietest note, the interest of any one looking in, or coming in, from the public front is steadily quickened and progressively rewarded, while the crowning effects at the rear of the buildings are reserved for the crowning moment when the visitor may be said to be fully received. On the other hand, if the approach is a returning one from the rear of the entire campus,—where stands the institution's only other building, a large tall-towered gymnasium, also of red brick,—these superlative effects show out across an open grassy distance of from two hundred to three hundred feet.
Wherefore—and here at last we venture to bring names of things and their places together—at the fronts of the northernmost and southernmost of these three "Halls" we set favorite varieties of white-flowering spireas (Thunbergia, sorbifolia, arguta, Van Houttei), the pearl-bush (exochorda), pink diervillas, and flowering-almonds. After these, on the southern side of the southernmost building, for example, followed lilacs, white and purple, against the masonry,—the white against the red brick, the lilac tint well away from it,—with tamarisk and kerria outside, abreast of them, and then pink and red spireas (Bumaldi and its dwarf variety, Anthony Waterer). On the other side of the same house we set deutzias (scabra against the brick-work and Lemoynei and gracilis outside). In a wing corner, where melting snows crash down from a roof-valley, we placed the purple-flowered Lespedeza penduliflorum, which each year dies to the ground before the snow-slides come, yet each September blooms from three to four feet high in drooping profusion. Then from that angle to the rear corner we put in a mass of pink wild roses. Lastly, on the tall, doorless, windowless rear end, we planted the crimson-rambler rose, and under it a good hundred of the red rugosas.
In the arrangement of these plantings we found ourselves called upon to deal with a very attractive and, to us, new phase of our question. The rising progression from front to rear was a matter of course, but how about the progression at right angles to it; from building to building, that is, of these three so nearly alike in size and dignity? To the passer-by along their Main Street front—the admiring passer-by, as we hope—should there be no augmentation of charm in the direction of his steps? And if there should be, then where and how ought it to show forth so as to avoid an anticlimax to one passing along the same front from the opposite direction? We promptly saw,—as the reader sees, no doubt, before we can tell it,—that what we wanted was two crescendos meeting somewhere near the middle; a crescendo passing into a diminuendo from whichever end you moved to the other—a swell. We saw that our loud-pedal effect should come upon "Middle Hall." So there, on its lucky bit of Greek porch, we bestowed the purple wistaria for spring, and for late summer that fragrant snowdrift, the clematis paniculata, so adapted as to festoon and chaplet, but never to smother, the Greek columns. On one of this structure's sides we planted forsythia, backed closer against the masonry by althæas, with the low and exquisite mahonia (holly-leafed barberry) under its outer spread. On the other side of the house we placed, first, loniceras (bush honeysuckles); next, azaleas, in variety and profusion; then, toward the rear end, a mass of hardy hydrangeas (Hydrangea paniculata grandiflora), and at the very back of the pile another mass, of the flowering-quince (Pyrus japonica), with the trumpet-creeper (Tecoma radicans), to climb out of it.
About "North Hall," the third building, we planted more quietly, and most quietly on its outer, its northern, side where our lateral "swell" (rising effect) begins, or ends, according to the direction of your going, beginning with that modest but pretty bloomer the Ligustrum ibota, a perfectly hardy privet more graceful than the California (ovalifolium) species, which really has little business in icy New England away from the seashore.
I might have remarked before that nearly all the walls of these three buildings, as well as the gymnasium on the far side of the campus, were already adorned with the "Boston ivy" (Ampelopsis Veitchii). With the plantings thus described, and with the gymnasium surrounded by yet stronger greenery; with the back fence masked by willows, elders and red-stemmed cornus; and with a number of haphazard footpaths reduced to an equally convenient and far more graceful few, our scheme stands complete in its first, but only, please notice, its first, phase. The picture is submitted to your imagination not as it looked the day we ceased planting, but as we expected it to appear after a season or two, and as it does look now.
At present, rather tardily, we have begun to introduce herbaceous flowering perennials, which we ignored in the first part of our plan, because herbaceous plants are the flesh and blood and garments of a complete living and breathing garden; the walls, shrubs, trees, walks and drives are its bones. When this secondary phase has been more fully realized and we have placed bush-clumps and tree-clumps out on the open campus, and when our hundreds of cottage gardens are shaking off the prison irons of frost, we hope, if you cannot do us the honor to be with us bodily, your spirit may be near, aiding us on in the conquest of this ever beautiful Where-to-Plant-What problem, which I believe would make us a finer and happier nation if it could be expanded to national proportions.