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How Gardening Neglected Victorian Graves Brought Community to a Philadelphia Cemetery
Photo by Allison Meier.
Before the Woodlands in Philadelphia was a cemetery, it was a garden. On this stretch of land on the west bank of the Schuylkill River in the late 18th century, botanist and plant collector William Hamilton cultivated specimens from around the world, including some of the first Gingkos planted in North America, and seeds collected by Lewis and Clark on their expedition. When the land was transformed into a burial ground in 1840 as part of the rural cemetery movement, which emphasized romantic landscapes in contrast to the crowded churchyards of colonial America, it maintained that gardening spirit. Instead of one man’s vision, however, these plantings were carried out by families, often in the fashionable Victorian cradle graves.
Courtesy of The Woodlands.
Over time those cradle graves — named for their shape that forms a planter between a marble or granite headstone, footstone, and two walls — were overgrown with grass and weeds as the families died out, moved away, or stopped visiting. When Jessica Baumert became executive director of the Woodlands in 2011, she came across an old Philadelphia guidebook that highlighted the “French-style” cradle graves, describing them as overflowing with flowers. “Knowing that guidebook existed kind of lived in the back of my head since I started working here, and I had the idea that someday it would be great if we planted these again,” Baumert said. “The site has a long horticultural legacy, but we had such a small staff at the time, and no facilities or landscape manager. So, figuring out how to pull something like that off would require a heavy volunteer base.”
The Woodlands launched its Grave Gardeners program in 2016 with the hopes of signing up 20 people for its inaugural year. Over 70 people applied, and their reasons for doing so were not just to get some extra gardening space. Some were West Philadelphia locals who wanted to be involved in a community effort; others had recently lost loved ones whose graves were too far for regular visits and wanted to garden in their honor. “It was this whole mix of responses, but all of them really thoughtful,” Baumert said. “And so, we decided, even though we didn’t really have any funding, that we would accept all of them.”
Courtesy of The Woodlands.
The Grave Gardeners program is now in its fourth year, with about 150 participants. Baumert described the cradle graves this spring as the lushest she’s ever seen, bursting with blooms, all from plants that would have been available in the late 19th century. Some flourish with purple irises and the sculptural flowers of foxglove; others have beds of richly red poppies and snapdragons. All of the necessary materials are provided to the Grave Gardeners. Partnerships with the nearby University of Pennsylvania, which shares greenhouse space for seeds and plugs, as well as Laurel Valley Soils and North Creek Nursery support a now thriving landscape on the site’s 54 acres.
Each participant attends four workshops before putting their hands in the cemetery dirt, some covering the basics of gardening. The first workshop, however, is on the rural cemetery movement, the botanical history of the Woodlands, and Victorian gardening aesthetics. “One of the things that we thought was important was to make it feel really special, because it is really special to be gardening in this site that has this horticultural legacy,” Baumert explained. “And a lot of people aren’t aware of that legacy.”
Grave Gardeners display at the Philadelphia Flower Show. Photo by Allison Meier.
Indeed, the Woodlands celebrates its roots as an urban respite, particularly as green space is scarcer in its neighborhood than it was back in Hamilton’s day. When the Woodlands presented a Grave Gardeners display at the recent Philadelphia Flower Show, they featured a picnic scene alongside the foam tombstones. The cemetery also hosts contemporary art exhibitions in Hamilton’s old mansion-house, offers a running trail around its perimeter, and allows dog walking. Just as the Woodlands was a rustic oasis for 19th-century Philadelphia, it encourages respectful recreation for its 21st-century neighbors.
“[The Grave Gardeners program] has been a great community builder, it’s become about more than just gardening for us,” Baumert said. “A lot of our donor base is now grave gardeners; there are people that bring their friends and family here to spread the word about the program. It’s just been above and beyond what we expected when we first threw it out into the world as a thing.”
Courtesy of The Woodlands.
Many cemeteries, especially those established with sprawling gardens in the 19th century, now rely on volunteers to help maintain these landscapes. Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta has volunteer workdays that include cultivating its cradle graves, and Mount Auburn in Cambridge, the first American burial ground in the rural cemetery movement, has active volunteer involvement in tending its gardens. Others like Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn are introducing workshops in which volunteers can learn about street tree planting while helping to line the cemetery’s perimeter with new arbors.
Applications for the next year of the Grave Gardeners program are opening in January. Its success in attracting and retaining volunteers, some of whom have been caring for the same plots for all four years, includes an engagement with history. Participants are supported in archival and genealogical research on the person’s grave they’re cultivating, with that reminder that this is a memorial for the dead as well as a green escape in the city making these actions more meaningful.
“If people are willing to think about cemeteries as more than just places to bury people, our position in the city makes us so accessible to so many,” Baumert stated. “And I want people to realize we can do these things here. People feel very obligated to the person whose grave they’re gardening, so they will come have a family picnic, and one of our gardeners last year had a birthday party for her guy that she invited all the grave gardeners to. It’s almost like bringing back the 19th century, but with people you didn’t know.”
Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on history and visual culture. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, creating videos, podcasts, events and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2019. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute, or become a patron on Patreon for exclusive content and rewards.
How Gardening Neglected Victorian Graves Brought Community to a Philadelphia Cemetery
May 18, 2019
May 14, 2019
April 27, 2019
Everyone Deserves a Death Buddy: The Value of Death Positive Friendships
Likely for millennia, there have been stereotypes associated with people interested in learning about death. Death-talk was often viewed as something for people who wear all black and worship the devil. Newsflash: Everybody dies. Wealthy, working poor, newborn, elderly, queer, cisgender, vertically challenged, statuesque, Latinx, South Asian, agnostic, Muslim… even you. But if death happens to everyone, why are so few people willing to talk about it? Is it the fear of the unknown? Faith doctrines that advise against it? Or social stigma tied to death and dying?
In the summer of 1984, I made my debut in this world three months prematurely. My early arrival resulted in months in the hospital and over 40 surgeries and counting. As a sick child, I had no choice but to ponder death. While my parents made sure that my childhood was filled with whimsy and joy, my mortality was often at the forefront of my mind. A medical oddity with a visible tracheostomy scar and paralyzed larynx, I was often outcasted by classmates. I daydreamed more often about the dress I would wear in my casket than my wedding dress, which caused me to feel further isolated from my peers.
Throughout my formative years I occasionally met others like myself who were miracle babies or otherwise medical mysteries, but I rarely voiced my innermost morbid thoughts. I suppose I felt that as a young, curvaceous, Black, suburban, Christian girl I had no license to discuss death. I assumed it was a subject better left to my math mate with her rail thin frame, pale white skin, and crushed velvet dresses.
My sophomore year of high school, I met one of my best friends, Elly*. She also had a some health issues early on in life and at 13 she was diagnosed with Marfan Syndrome, a rare disease affecting the body’s connective tissue. For years, we didn’t speak much about her condition; her symptoms were not obvious to the uneducated eye. Plus, we were too busy passing notes and talking about our crushes in code. After high school, we attended the same university, during which time we grew apart (because everyone who warned us that best friends should not be college roommates was right).
Junior year, I discovered via social media that she underwent emergency open heart surgery to repair her aortic dissection and replace a leaky valve. Shortly thereafter, I ran into her on campus and we quickly reconciled our relationship. Around the same time, both sets of our parents were either diagnosed with major illnesses or experienced catastrophic medical emergencies, and together we began to experience the loss of several friends and classmates in various ways in a relatively short amount of time. The culmination of these events opened the door for us to talk about life and death for the first time in our friendship.
Our discussions ranged from the deep and somewhat ethereal, like what life after death is like, to the more practical, like whether or not people should tag dead friends on social media as though they are still living. We did not always share the same thoughts and ideology about death; Elly’s earthy spirituality did not align with my Christian-Judeo faith. But despite our different perspectives, we kept the conversation going.
I lost Elly in 2018 to complications of Marfan. Understandably, her death shook me. She was truly as close to me as a sister. But it was upon her death that I realized, in addition to being my best friend, she was my Death Buddy: the one person I could talk to about absolutely anything without fear that she would judge me, find me weird, or rush to change the subject — even if the subject was death. I notice now that when someone new dies, be it a celebrity stranger or a close loved one, I still reach for my phone to get her feedback and then realize she won’t be able to provide me with a response.
Image from The Gender Spectrum Collection. Photographer, Zackary Drucker.
Following her death, I’ve tried broaching the topic with others with no real success. So I am now on the quest for a new Death Buddy. Someone with whom I can talk about a very serious topic in a relatively matter-of-fact manner. If you are interested in finding your own Death Buddy, I suggest you look for someone who:
Has earned your trust and whose trust you have earned
Will not judge you
Respects your beliefs and boundaries
Is willing to be frank and open
Let’s you mourn without making it about them
Will not rush you through the grieving process
And, knows how to balance the dark with the light.
The search thus far has not turned up the best results. Some potential candidates know how to balance the dark with the light through levity and laughter, but aren’t great at respecting my boundaries and beliefs. Others are willing to be frank and open with their opinions, but have a tendency to judge my thoughts and understandings. Then of course, there are those who fit most of the criteria, but we do not know each other well enough yet to have earned each other’s trust.
I guess the new breaking news story for me is that every relationship won’t meet all of my needs. In fact, most will not but having at least one person you can count on to help you navigate death conversations is important. In fact, talking about death is even healthy! According to a 2016 HuffPost article by physician Supreeya Sarup, D.O., “In accepting that our days are limited we are able to value our today, and this is why I believe it is crucial we start talking about death now.” Death positive movements like Death Salon and End Well echo Sarup’s sentiments and actively seek to normalize end-of-life discussions by integrating them into our everyday lives.
Image from The Gender Spectrum Collection. Photographer, Zackary Drucker.
Valuing my today is something that, despite my constant consideration of death over the years, is not something that I always embraced. For far too long I allowed the nearness of death to limit my endeavors. Whether it was staying inside during a fresh spring downpour, fearful that my rain-soaked socks would somehow lead to a fatal cold if I decided to dance in the rain, or rarely venturing far from my handful of go-to menu items for fear of unwittingly consuming my fatal last meal, I lead a life that was cloaked in careful and cautious behavior.
However, the last several months I have made it a point to take risks. From taking a biking tour through San Francisco (after not having ridden a bike for 20 years) to treating my tastebuds to new things (my latest adventure is kombucha!), I am finally stepping outside of my personal cocoon in order to live a more fulfilled, enriched life. I may not jump any bases or dive any cliffs anytime soon, but every day I wake up is another day that I get to choose to truly live. If it takes talking about death to finally experience life, then that is a conversation I am willing to have as often as I can.
Aisha Adkins is a writer, caregiver, advocate, graduate student, and speaker based in Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate student at Georgia State University’s Andrew Young School, this authentic storyteller is driven by faith, inspired by family, and eager to use her talents to affect positive social change. She is a full-time caregiver for her mother and founder of Our Turn 2 Care. When she is not a doting daughter and agent of change, she enjoys classic film, live music, and nature.
Disclaimer: names have been changed out of respect for the privacy of individuals.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.
Everyone Deserves a Death Buddy: The Value of Death Positive Friendships
April 22, 2019
April 18, 2019
The Royals Who Shared Their Beds With Mummies
Via Patrimonio Nacional
When Prince Don Carlos, the son of the most powerful man in the world, took a bad fall, it was feared that the festering wound on his forehead would bring his short life to an end. It was 1562, and if anyone had the means to save someone from the clutches of death, it was Philip II of Spain, the king of the Empire where the sun never set. He gathered the most eminent doctors and anatomists around his son’s bed, yet none of them were able to find a cure. Since science had failed, the royal confessor resolved, perhaps they should seek help from Heaven.
The king was a devout Catholic, known for his “holy greed for relics”: his collection, which he kept close to his bedchambers, included 12 whole skeletons, 144 heads, and thousands of bones from all known saints, except three. However, their alleged healing properties, a deeply-rooted Christian belief, didn’t work on young Don Carlos. Instead, the king’s confessor, Bernardo de Fresneda, suggested they seek the intercession of local miracle-maker Fray Diego de Alcalá. Since he had been dead for a hundred years the friar couldn’t perform a miracle in his living presence, but perhaps his corpse would.
At the orders of the king, Fray Diego’s sarcophagus was opened so his mummified remains could be brought to the prince’s room, where they were ceremoniously laid next to him. Days later, Don Carlos finally woke up. He told his father that he’d dreamed of Diego, who said he would live. His miraculous recovery was attributed to the relics’ sacred power, and the friar was later canonised.
Prince Don Carlos receiving the the mummy into his bed (1622).
The image of the 18-year-old prince sharing his bed with the shrivelled corpse of a man yanked out of the grave at the king’s orders is nothing short of shocking, but it wouldn’t have been an unusual sight in the court of the Spanish Habsburgs. In 1619, 57 years after the episode of Prince Don Carlos, Philip III, the successor of Philip II, fell gravely ill when he travelled from Portugal to Madrid, and had to be tended in the town of Casarrubios del Monte. As death loomed close, a procession brought from Madrid to his bedside the incorrupt body of Isidore the Labourer, an 11thcentury farmworker known for having performed several miracles in his lifetime, but yet to be a saint. His mummy, also considered miraculous, had been mutilated twice, according to oral tradition: the first time in 1381, when Queen Consort Juana Manuel demanded one arm, but returned it on the spot, since she was suddenly struck “with a paroxysm”; the second time, in the 15thcentury, when a servant of Queen Isabella bit off one of its toes as she pretended to ceremonially kiss its feet. Isidore’s body, lain next to Philip III, allegedly revived the king, and his canonisation, initiated by Philip II, was completed in 1622.
Carlos II, “The Bewitched”, Juan Carreño de Miranda (c. 1685)
In 1641, when Queen Mariana of Austria went into labor, the bodies of both Diego and Isidore were brought to her chambers as she gave birth to the sickly boy who would become the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, Charles II, known as “The Bewitched”. We now know that his innumerable health problems were the consequence of several generations of inbreeding, however, Charles II believed himself hexed, a concern also shared by his court and subjects. Seeking relief, he became a regular bedfellow of both mummies, and was also the beneficiary of the third mutilation of Isidore’s body, when a locksmith pulled out one of its teeth so the king could keep it under his pillow.
No remedy, heavenly or otherwise, was able to solve the fertility problems of Charles II. His first wife died after ten years of marriage without having produced an heir. His second wife, Maria Anna of Neuburg, was chosen because of the extraordinary fertility that seemed to run in her family: her mother having given birth to twenty-three children. Sadly, this didn’t exempt Maria Anna from being treated for a problem that was more than likely rooted in her husband’s condition. She was subjected to copious blood-letting and aggressive fertility treatments, leaving her so debilitated that the doctors feared for her life, but she recovered after lying next to Isidore’s remains. As a measure of gratitude, she commissioned an urn of silver, where the saint’s body is still stored.
The custom of sharing beds with Isidore’s mummy didn’t fade with the demise of Charles II. The saint’s thaumaturgic powers also protected the following dynasty, that of the Bourbons: Maria Luisa of Savoy, Charles III and his wife, Maria Amalia of Saxony, who all welcomed his body into their royal chambers.
Catholics still venerate relics, and, occasionally, some of them are brought to the beds of the infirm. We find it easier to accept when these relics are fragments of clothing, bones, or even skulls or limbs, but our modern culture has had such little contact with dead bodies that the idea of sharing a bed with a mummy is unimaginable. Did the Habsburgs have to overcome a revulsion towards corpses to lie next to the remains of these saints? Perhaps they did, but instead, regarded it as a privilege they were able to enjoy solely because of their royal status.
El beso de la reliquia, by Joaquín Sorolla, (1893).
The Christian belief in the resurrection of body as well as soul implies that all bodies are sacred, touched by the divine through incarnation and resurrection, so venerating mortal remains is considered natural. Relics which hold the power that the saints had once channelled when they were alive, aren’t merely a symbol of the divine, but an embodiment of it. Lying next to these remains, in their own private rooms, was unattainable for regular people. Yet, for the Habsburgs, this was an act of faith, a powerful reminder of both their own mortality and the hope for an afterlife, as well as an expression of their great power and their privilege.
Maria J. Pérez Cuervo is a UK-based writer who specialises in history, archaeology, art, myth, and mystery. Her work appears regularly in Fortean Times, Mental Floss, and Daily Grail. She tweets @mjpcuervo.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, creating videos, podcasts, events and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2019. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute, or become a patron on Patreon for exclusive content and rewards.
April 7, 2019
Caitlin Doughty's Blog
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