Category Archives: Cemeteries

Gardens, houses, and the passing of time

26 Thursday Jul 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, Gardens, heirloom plants, memento mori, Roses, Rustling

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My best recent exploration occurred when I drove up a steep and bumpy dirt road that hugged the side of a forested mountain. The little road twisted along for what seemed like an overly long time, considering how little there was along it. The thick canopy was broken only occasionally for clearings surrounding the few homes I passed. As a narrow-minded city person I couldn’t help but wonder, who would live all the way out here?

The road turned into a track, still navigable in four wheel drive for a little while more before becoming impassible. Where I stopped there was a low stone wall.

On the other side of the wall was a cellar hole, now just a depression. Foundation stones were tumbled around its bottom, which was partly covered over by a think layer of fallen leaves.

A little ways from the depression, located in what must have been a clearing once, were five small, rough, unmarked graves. Daylilies grew all around the markers, as did this rose.

The hands that planted and tended this rose have long been still, and the unmarked graves leave no clue as to who they were that lived and died here. Their home is gone, their fields returned to forest. The plants themselves are almost the only pieces of material culture left to bear their witness.

A house feels permanent, a person seems semi-permanent, and a garden feels ephemeral. But there must have been a point in time where one’s decay accelerated, while the others’ were stayed. I brought a little chunk of this rose back home with me, and I hope it survives. If it does, it will be a memento mori,  reminding me of the short durations of people, buildings, and tended spaces.

Double cinnamon rose

09 Monday Jul 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, heirloom plants, Roses, Uncategorized

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Sometimes there seems to be an inverse ratio between how old a plant is and how much we know about it. The older the variety, the more its story is shrouded in the dusty rubble of antiquity and obscurity. This is very true of the European species the double cinnamon rose, R. cinnamonea flora pleno.

The rose appears listed in the most famous botanical treatise of the sixteenth century, John Gerard’s Great Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes. The 1596 book was popular for over a century, and is a compendium of all the horticultural plants known in England at that time.

This pedigree does not seem to have brought the double cinnamon rose much respect in the ensuing four hundred years. Identified by its somewhat flat flower heads with exposed stamens and its curious shiny brown twiggy canes, it is a rose rarely cultivated, but found often in really old cemeteries throughout the Northeastern US. It must be tough, because it is often the only surviving rose in country graveyards like this one.

As for the name, it is sometimes posited that the flowers smell like cinnamon. I sniffed until I was lightheaded, but couldn’t get even the faintest whiff of spice. I favor the other theory, that the brown stems resemble the bark of the cinnamon tree.

We don’t know how this rose came to North America, but this flower pilgrim must have crossed over early, and probably often, to have found its way to so many remote places, where it has lingered unnoticed ever since.

An appointment with Dr. Huey

21 Monday May 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, Roses

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Perhaps you’ve come across a garden in which lives a rose that blooms only once a year, unfurling crimson, yellow-centered semi-double flowers that fade to the color of a bloody handkerchief. Its foliage is a little prone to black spot, and its lanky canes are unable to stay upright, preferring to lean on a fence or other shrubbery. If this description sounds familiar, it’s bound to be a rose called Dr. Huey, still making house calls after all these years.

In 1914 the first edition of The Practical Book of Outdoor Rose Growing was published. The author was George C. Thomas of Philadelphia, and the dedication page reads:

This book is affectionately dedicated Dr. Robert Huey, who gave me my first inspiration in rose growing.

Dr. Huey was besides a rose breeder a dentist who pioneered a technique of whitening discolored teeth. In his spare time he was president of the English Setter Club of Philadelphia.

George Thomas, the author, was interested in growing roses outdoors. The estate hothouses that kept roses on the 19th century table were becoming cumbrous and too expensive to maintain in the age of modernity. His mission was to create hardy new roses that could thrive in a regular garden environment.

He bred his roses at Bloomfield Farm, incidentally now part of Philadelphia’s Morris Arboretum. A crimson flowered wichuriaina seedling he developed in 1914 was named in honor of his friend and colleague, the illustrious dentist.

Most of Thomas’ hybridizing work reached obsolescence pretty quickly. But in the 1950s it was discovered that one of the best and toughest roses to use as a rootstock when grafting was old Dr. Huey. Soon many of the roses for sale in this country went out into the world on Dr. Huey rootstock. This is why it’s still so pervasive in old gardens and cemeteries today.

When the original graft is either cut back too low or dies off, tough Dr. Huey sprouts from the base.

If you have Dr. Huey in your garden and you feel like getting rid of it, don’t feel too guilty. Whoever put it there did so unintentionally. And if you like your Dr. Huey, now that you know its history you can appreciate it even more.

Ghosts

02 Wednesday May 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, Columbine, heirloom plants

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Driving through the country and stopping at old cemeteries a few summers ago, I came across some little columbine seedlings at the edge of an old graveyard someplace in Central Vermont. They must have been mowed just as they were going to flower, because I only saw just one little bloom low down on a plant.

I dug a few out and brought them back to a garden the size of a baby pool I started up there. It houses my cemetery plant collections. For two summers I watched the columbines grow into huge, healthy plants. But I never timed my vacation right to see the flowers in bloom.

Late last fall I dug out one of the now-big plants and drove it across three states back to my garden in Philadelphia.

I planted it in a protected spot that gets a few hours of sunshine, and by late April it was in bloom. Voila.

It seems to be the variety Aquilegia vulgaris var. plena, Double Pink Columbine. I can’t find too much information about it, but the cemetery where I found it didn’t have any graves after about 1908. So it must be an old variety that escaped the grave it was planted on and has been haunting the edges of that pretty little graveyard ever since.

Grey gardens

25 Wednesday Jan 2012

Posted by in Cemeteries, heirloom plants

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I live in Philadelphia, but whenever I get out to the country my favorite thing to do is to drive around, looking for old graveyards.

I have to, because in populated areas like where I live most cemeteries get the horticultural equivalent to a Brazilian bikini wax. No wayward blade of grass or rogue flower spike break the broad expanses of shaved green turf.

From my older plant rustling friends, I hear that this wasn’t the case before the introduction of non-selective herbicides (i.e. RoundUp.) They describe how even twenty five years ago there were numbers of ornamental plants- iris, roses, lilies, and other perennials like the Sweet William below- still growing over graves where they had been planted decades, even centuries prior.

Cemeteries were the first public gardens in America. Before there were parks or arboreta, cemeteries like Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill were huge attractions, popular for their beautiful vistas, lush landscaping, and carefully tended gravesites carpeted with flowering plants.

Today the only vestiges left from this tradition are often the headstones like this one.

But occasionally it’s possible to find a plant or two in a forgotten dirt road graveyard. Sometimes it’s a rose growing up between two closely spaced headstones where the mower can’t reach. Or a perennial that has reseeded itself along the graveyard edges, where the forest is starting to creep back into the clearing.

My found collection of the flowers and shrubs that I’ve found this way is small, but growing a little each year. This blog will be a record of my fascination with a chunk of history that has basically vaporized within the last seventy years- the great affection and emotion that people have felt for plants, particularly flowers. A few of us still feel it.

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