Sneaky Beauty

For a burial ground, Mount Auburn Cemetery is extremely lively. Part eternal resting place, part arboretum, Mount Auburn unfolds in a sprawling 175 acres and is home to over 5,000 trees in 700 different varieties; numerous kinds of flowering shrubbery, plants, and other types of blooms; it holds ponds, small river features, cultivated gardens, woodland clearings, an enormous chapel, and a 64-foot tall observation tower that offers panoramic views for more than 60 miles. Over 90,000 dearly (or not so dearly) departed are interred on the grounds, including some heavyweights like poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and painter Winslow Homer (with spaces still available!). Also, it’s kind of a bird sanctuary. The cemetery draws birders in every season. You’ll see them with their binoculars scanning the crowns of trees in search of any one of more than 80 species of birds that call Mount Auburn home. It’s such a popular spotting spot that staff keep a regularly updated chalk board by the entrance gate of species to look out for. Who knew a cemetery could be such a go-to destination in more ways than one?

Jacob Bigelow, for one. He is the nineteenth-century physician partly responsible for making Mount Auburn a reality. Bigelow had been growing concerned for some time about American death practices. Namely the custom of burying bodies beneath churches, which was not only unhealthy but ran the risk of running out of space for the departed. File under: ew. Bigelow proposed this new kind of cemetery space modeled after the idyllic Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, elegantly combing natural elements with burial plots. When Mount Auburn was dedicated in 1831, it marked a break from the style and conventions of church-affiliated graveyards and also signaled a shift in the perception of death as peaceful rather than entirely dour. In other words: make it a place for dead people, but picnicky. Mount Auburn is credited with kicking off America’s public parks and garden movement. It became so renowned that in the 1840s it ranked up there Niagra Falls and Mount Vernon as one of the most popular tourist stops in the country. Leave it to New Englanders to make “visiting a graveyard” number one on a vacation bucket list.

I recently visited the cemetery for one reason: to find a Threadleaf Japanese Maple tree. I know. Who stalks a tree? But for a long time, every fall I would see images of this tree in my social media feeds, but fail to make a pilgrimage to the cemetery to see one of these for myself. Not this season. However, in all the images I had come across, no one ever gave any coordinates to these trees. There were lots of captions like “Made it to my favorite Japanese maple in Mount Auburn again this fall!” Bragger. But nothing helpful such as “Don’t miss this Japanese Maple fifteen feet from the Greeley Fountain conveniently located on the Juniper path about 12 paces inside the east gate.” Because in case you’ve just been skimming along here: THE CEMETERY IS 175 DAMN ACRES WITH OVER 700 KINDS OF TREES! That’s like looking for the matching sock in a dryer the size of the Death Star. The most I could come up with was a short blog post on the cemetery’s website about how the trees were transplanted from a courtyard in the Boston Public Library in 1999 to a space called The Asa Gray Garden just inside the cemetery’s main gate.

When I arrived at the cemetery on a chilly, early Sunday morning the only thing I spotted in the Gray Garden area was a lumpy bushy thing, hunched over, covered in shaggy, feathery leaves like something birthed in the Jim Henson Muppet creature shop. I walked over for a closer look. I towered over the squat thing. No way this could be the same tree I had been drooling over all this time. The pictures I saw were of spiraling branches, up and out. Then I noticed a small part in its leafy curtain. I squatted down and peered in, feeling enormously self-conscious and also wondering if I might actually be crawling through a portal to Narnia. I crab-walked into the small circumference under the tree and that’s when I saw it.  

Underneath that unassuming throw-rug of canopy, the tree’s arms twirl and spiral out and around in all directions. Sunlight filtering in through its papery-thin leaves throw disco ball colors inside what feels like roof and walls. From the outside the leaves are red when they are fully turned or else green with some copper shading. But inside there were pinks and reds and subtle golds and flashes of blue and hints of violet. All of this playing out against the tree’s kinky arms, arranged as if the tree were in a state of perpetual grooving to music only it could hear.

Groove maple. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Once I had unlocked the secret to this sneaky beauty I kept my eyes peeled for others stashed around the grounds. Every time I spotted one, I tried to walk over to it casually as if I were just sauntering around looking at any other kind of pretty tree and not what it actually felt like: climbing inside a shaman’s yurt to take a journey through the cosmos.

Disco party situation up in here! ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Definitely what the inside of David Bowie’s soul looks like. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography

Why had I waited so long to experience one of these marvels for myself? In my mind’s eye I saw the last several years tick along with fall taking off from a jog to a sprint with the color of the leaves bursting and fading what seemed like far too fast and too many places to be in such a short period. The timing never quite worked out.

What a thing to think standing in the middle of a cemetery. I bet every single person planted in the ground around me had infinite variations of the same sentiment: I’ll do it later; I’ll go tomorrow; we can talk about it next time; let’s plan for a visit in the spring. Like trains on a track these thoughts run through our minds to forge paths in our lives that become fixed while the Universe laughs and laughs and laughs. It’s all far too finite and there really is no time like now to find all that beauty that’s hiding in plain sight waiting to be found.  

Cross section of the cosmos. ©SheilaMoeschenPhotography