Top Care, the company employed by Washington University in St. Louis to tend to the grounds, has intensified its beautification efforts in order to finish just after students go home for the summer. Top Care employees have begun an intensive, expensive regimen of flower and grass planting, turning the campus from the barren expanse that winter left it into a verdant garden of Eden that nobody who pays tuition will get to enjoy.

Among the changes that Top Care has begun to affect on campus are new flowers for previously empty flowerbeds and the extensive planting of new grass. “We even planted some grass in the Quad, only to tear it up again the next day when Chancellor Wrighton said it wasn’t the right shade of green,” said Burton Cameron, spokesperson for Top Care. “Everything needs to look its best for when the University is empty of students.”

In order to make sure that the students paying for these renovations do not inadvertently enjoy them, areas of new grass have been roped off and trees have been covered in unappealing cables for no apparent purpose. Cameron says the cordons and cables will be removed when the last student has left Washington University for the summer. “With any luck, by the time they come back in August, just about everything will have died again!” he said.