A Brief History of the Union College Grounds
The present Union College Grounds on Nistiquona Hill comprise some one hundred acres of campus, playing fields, gardens and wood- lands, the remnant of a much larger tract acquired by Eliphalet Nott during the early part of his sixty-two year tenure as Union's president. In 1813, Nott hired the French landscape architect Joseph-Jacques Ramee to lay out seventy acres of "pleasure grounds" and to create an architectural plan for the new campus. Included in Ramee's various schemes for the campus were formal gardens and informal "English" gardens; both approaches are still apparent in the plantings of today.
The largest of Ramee's gardens was along Hans Groot's Kill behind North College, about where a formal garden was developed in the 1830s by a professor of mathematics, Captain Isaac Jackson. Visited by Audubon and by Frederick Law Olmstead, the planner of New York City's Central Park, Jackson's Garden has been a spectacular-campus scene for a century and a half. Also on the campus are two smaller, newer gardens: the President's Garden, next to the President's House on South Terrace Lane, and Mrs. Perkin's Garden, behind Old Chapel, named for the professor's wife who tended it for many years.
Gardens excepted, the Grounds received little formal landscaping in the nineteenth century. The oldest surviving photographs suggest that most of the campus was cleared of trees, although here and there a bit of the forest primeval survived. The most spectacular of those original, precollege trees was the "Nott elm" in Jackson's Garden; it expired in 1937, at an age variously estimated from 350 to 600 years.
Elms were the key element in Union's first general landscaping efforts, begun late in the last century. All the principal campus roadways were lined with American elms (Ulmus americana) which eventually grew to cover the roads with leafy arches. Tragically, the elms reached climactic size just as the Dutch elm disease arrived in Schenectady. Starting in the early 1950s, the campus elms were progressively destroyed by the disease, with as many as three dozen of the giant trees succumbing in some years. Four decades later, only a very few scattered specimens remain.
A few far sighted members of the campus community perceived that the elm disease would soon denude the campus of the trees that were responsible for most of its landscaping effects, and began an informal replanting program. A major impetus came, however, in 1962, when the trustees made the first in a series of substantial allocations for campus planting. These appropriations, supplemented by various special funds and by donors of "living memorials," made possible a systematic area-by-area landscaping program conceived and supervised since its inception by Professors C.W. Huntley and Gilbert Hariow. More recently the program has benefited from the talents of John G. Utynski, landscape architect and former Director of Physical Plant Development and Planning.
Because so many and varied kinds of plantings are contained in a relatively few compact areas, this guide has been prepared to assist the campus visitor in locating and identifying about 200 species and varieties of deciduous and evergreen trees, shrubs and other plantings of particular interest. The number and letter listed with each entry indicate the approximate location of that variety on the map of the campus.