The Louise Bush-Brown Formal Perennial Garden has served generations of students as a living classroom, highlighting modern horticulture techniques and showcasing new perennial plant selections, and is a place forteaching design principles and maintenance techniques.

Renowned landscape designer Beatrix Farrand and James Bush-Brown, a beloved faculty member of the Pennsylvania School of Horticulture for Women and Louise Bush-Brown’s husband, collaborated on the English-style design of the symmetrical center space, installed in 1928.

Their creation, tended and renewed over generations, is a tapestry of texture and form with a seasonal color change set against the backdrop of the evergreen hedge.

Louise Carter Bush-Brown, who would direct the course of the school from 1924 to 1952, was part of the second graduating class in 1915.

It was under the direction of Louise Bush-Brown that the Pennsylvania Horticulture School for Women truly thrived. Along with boosting enrollment, she established degree-bearing programs with the Cambridge School of Landscape and Landscape Architecture and Smith College Graduate School. She also broadened the cultural diversity of the school by attracting students from Japan, Australia, and West Germany.

Bush-Brown and her husband co-authored America’s Garden Book in 1939, which became the number one selling general garden book in the country. During her tenure as school director, they also published The Farmer’s Digest, a publication through which to share the research and knowledge of the faculty and students with the general public.