Heading to Boston a few weeks ago for a memorial service, I started thinking about how trees convey a sense of the eternal. From the promise of young saplings first reaching skyward to mighty specimens whose soulful branches look like the outstretched arms of someone in the throes of prayer, trees capture an indescribable magic as they also chronicle the passage of time. Somehow, they also leave time behind, connecting us all at once to the past and the present—and to the future when we will be no longer.
The afternoon before the service, I walked through the Arnold Arboretum, which made me think about the spiritual element of trees and why they are so powerful in our lives and in our memories. The Arnold, curated and managed by Harvard, is the home to innumerable trees brought back to the States from all over the Northern Hemisphere over the past 150 years; it is a testament to plant explorers, such as Charles Sprague Sargent and Ernest Wilson, and generations that followed them, as they searched for species of evergreen and deciduous conifers, hardwoods and flowering trees and shrubs. They brought these species back to grow and study and, in some cases, such as with Franklinia and dawn redwoods, to work to bring them back from near extinction.
Walking about the Arnold, one could not help but take in all this history and to see these trees, many of which are minimally managed in keeping with the institution’s treatment of them as objects of study, allowing them to take on forms one assumes they would take on in the wild. The Arnold is moving and exciting, but somehow abstracted from celebrating the connection between these collected plants and humankind. I left inspired, and happy to see that the Arnold is working on building an understory of herbaceous plants in some areas of the arboretum, giving the trees a better foil for their majesty.
The following morning, I headed to Mount Auburn well before the service for my friend Alex, as I knew I would want to spend time exploring this celebrated cemetery known for its incredible collection of trees and shrubs. Often viewed as the first landscaped cemetery in the United States, Mount Auburn was formed in 1831, and its 175 acres are charged with the goal of comforting the bereaved and commemorating the deceased in a beautiful setting. The site is breathtaking, with specimens of every imaginable species that could grow in the Boston area, nurtured lovingly over the decades into living sculptures as remarkable as the carved limestone and marble memorials that also fill the landscape.
I could not imagine a more suitable setting for a memorial for Alex — a plantsman, a scientist, an artist, and an entrepreneur who, like a great tree, continued to grow in complexity, beauty and spirit as the years moved forward. His connection to nature, from making herbarium specimens of seaweed to understanding the medicinal value that plants had to share with humankind, was also a product of simply exploring the landscape and taking it all in. In this sense, Alex would be at home in the Arnold, in the mountains of Western Massachusetts, or in a more cultivated landscape such as Mount Auburn.
As his family and friends shared memories of him, I felt that Alex would certainly enjoy taking in the Arnold – its history and the stories of the passionate collectors who brought specimens back to the United States. However, he truly belonged where he would be interred—in a landscape that celebrated not only the glory of nature but the interconnection between humankind and the natural world. The love that was given to the artfully pruned trees at Mount Auburn did not merely celebrate nature, but rather memorialized the complex connection between humans and the world around us, a thought often left behind in the complicated time in which we are living.
And with that thought, the success of Mount Auburn became most apparent, for it connected the eternal in us to the landscape that surrounds us and gives us a place to see those whom we love long beyond their time on earth.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
