“Memory is a gardener’s real palette; memory as it summons up the past, memory as it shapes the present, memory as it dictates the future.” 

– Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book):

For almost twenty years I have been preoccupied with death, beginning when the few women in my maternal bloodline began disappearing into the unknown: my mother in 2006, followed by my grandmother in 2009 along with her two sisters within the same year. In an effort to make sense of these unfathomable losses, through writing, I started exploring grief in such an obsessive way that I often forgot what it meant to be alive. I wrote about these losses with no clear ending in sight, no conclusion to what I’ve learned, and a fear in closing the literal and proverbial chapters of my grieving. When the pandemic brought with it death, illness, and isolation, I hit a wall; I craved something that fed the heart beating inside, because there is no dying, nor writing, without living.

In 2022, I joined the Grave Gardener program at the historic Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia, which includes more than 150 volunteer gardeners who adopt a cradle grave that they tend to throughout the growing season. Cradle graves, also called bedstead graves, were abundant in the Victorian era, offering a place for loved ones of the deceased to keep their memory alive, as well as spend time in a serene green space outside of the city. These graves consist of a headstone, footstone, and two low side walls that create a small rectangular garden bed. Most cradle graves were implemented in 1860 through 1910 in garden cemeteries, and have sat flowerless for decades as family members died off and the gardens went unattended. Today, the grave gardeners resurrect these plots with Victorian era flowers and plants, helping to keep our favorite local green space looking its best. 

Part 1: Garden Cemetery Movement

Originated as landscaped, park-like settings that encouraged community and socializing among the living while honoring the dead, garden cemeteries were the precursor to public parks in the United States. The very first garden cemetery was Père Lachaise, on the outskirts of Paris, founded in 1804. Built on a grand scale, on a landscape filled with architectural and horticultural design, Père Lachaise freed the cemetery from the church. It took a few years before it appealed to the public to visit while alive or be buried when dead, due to its distance from the city and secular founding. Today, it is the most frequented necropolis in the world, with more than a million bodies—including many famous ones, such as Colette, Oscar Wilde, Édith Piaf, Jim Morrison, and Gertrude Stein.  

The Garden Cemetery Movement came to the US in 1831 with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, MA; Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, PA in 1836; Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY in 1838; and the Woodlands Cemetery in Philadelphia, PA in 1840. Their popularity rose when church graveyards had become breeding grounds for nefarious behavior (crime, gambling, sex) and disease; they were overrun with dead bodies that seeped into water supplies and caused deadly epidemics. 

In the Victorian age, attitudes towards death shifted. The people of this time were well-acquainted with high mortality rates from plethora epidemics and the Civil War, and they accepted our ubiquitous fate with peace, pleasure, and grace. Unlike graveyards, garden cemeteries had no religious affiliation, and the foreboding skull and crossbones headstone carvings were replaced with poppies, doves, and other serene imagery. Garden cemeteries offered beauty through horticultural design, community space for picnics and gatherings on the weekends, and meditative peace for those looking to escape the crowded city. Their popularity inspired landscape architects to create city parks: a good example of this is Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, which was so popular that it inspired the creation of both Central Park and Prospect Park.

Garden cemeteries eventually became less frequented for leisure as death fell out of vogue in the late 19th century—the pendulum swung back, and attitudes shifted once again: the declining mortality rate resulted in a preferred ignorance of the only omnipresent promise, parks rose in popularity with the formation of the public park systems in most cities, and garden cemeteries were left for dead. Cities expanded and absorbed these cemeteries, which went into neglect for decades. 

In the last ten or so years, garden cemeteries have been brought back to life. They are tended to by staff, gardeners, and volunteers, and offer space for art, events, education, and nature. They offer green space where there is a lack thereof. The living picnic in them, read in them, meet for coffee in them, walk their dogs in them, run through them, get married in them—they are anything but lifeless.  

Suggested Reading:

Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (2002)
In the Garden Cemetery: The Revival of America’s First Garden Parks, Tate Williams (2014)
Silent City On A Hill: Picturesque Landscapes of Memory and Boston’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, Blanche Linden (1989)
History: Laurel Hill Cemetery
History: Père Lachaise Cemetery 
History: Green-Wood Cemetery

Part 1.5: A Memory 

You showed me how to move the mouths of snapdragons like puppets, how to slide out the honeysuckle style to sip the nectar. You showed me the dusty heat of the hot peppers that you grew, dried, and flaked; the thoughtfulness and care that goes into eating a whole artichoke; and the comfort in a fried squash blossom stuffed with ricotta and thyme. You told me that the forsythia you grew were named for me, and pointed out our similarities: tall, sturdy, born in spring. 

Part 2: Grave Gardens

Not all cemeteries hold the same community-minded and horticultural appeal as garden cemeteries. My mother is buried in an arboretum memorial park on Long Island, which could be described as a museum of living trees and dead people. You can’t plant for the dead there, and are instead offered a small urn that pulls out from the ground to be filled with water and cut flowers. At first, I’d stop at one of the many flower shops in between the multiple monument makers along the miles-long road that housed more than a few cemeteries, and I’d instantly regret not procuring flowers elsewhere. These flower shops, where no one buys bouquets for breathing bodies, are always named after a person—someone that I can’t help but assume is dead. There’s always a holiday special, as well as a section of silk flowers dyed unnatural colors, like blue raspberry or bubblegum pink—egregious immortality. Despite their best efforts to cater to any other occasion, these flower shops smack of death, powerless against the ubiquitous grief on this long road of graves. I’d quickly grab a handful of overpriced sunflowers, make small talk with the cashier, and vow to never set foot in such odorous hell ever again. 

Years later, after moving to Philadelphia, I discovered the Woodlands’ Grave Gardeners program. Visiting my mother’s gravesite felt so sterile and, to my dismay, without meaning—or perhaps, too disassociated, as I am often haunted by the memory of her funeral. I was looking for something that felt more personally meaningful than cut flowers, something that encouraged growth among the grief. I had already been a frequent visitor to the Woodlands, located in West Philadelphia and once the estate of botanist and plant collector William Hamilton until his death in 1813. The Woodlands became a garden cemetery in 1840, with the Articles of Incorporation of the Woodlands Cemetery Company stating, “Whereby the beautiful landscape and scenery of that situation (Hamilton’s Estate) may be perpetually preserved, and its ample space for the free circulation of air, and groves of trees afford a security against encroachments upon the dead, and health and solace to the living.”

When I first began as a grave gardener at the Woodlands, I was assigned to the joint grave of Charles and Sophia Goehman, who both died in the late 19th century. When I greeted the grave for the first time, sprouting from the outside corners of the grave were spring starflowers, six-petaled white stars edged in blue. At the foot is a shallow urn that holds water—a bird bath. Inside it already had plenty of plants beginning their annual return toward the sun: daffodils, tulips, catmint, lilies, and irises—all planted by the previous gardener, who, on one of my weekly gardenings, happened to be visiting her old haunt. We had the chance to discuss the experience of tending to this particular grave, and while she no longer lives in the neighborhood nor is a part of the Grave Gardener program, she comes back often to check in on it. To meet the previous caretaker of this plot I have grown so fond of, who too has spent so many mornings with her hands in the soil, who passed the torch on to me, was a delight—to know she visits often to see what still grows from under her care and what new has grown reminds me that I am planting for more than just the dead.

Suggested Reading:

How Gardening Neglected Victorian Graves Brought Community to a Philadelphia Cemetery, Allison C. Meier (2019)
History: The Woodlands

Part 2.5: A Memory

We’re kneeling together in the grass, bending over red, pink, and orange impatiens that you plant every year after the last frost and nurture through fall. You show me how the seed pods burst at the seams with a squeeze or a poke, or, sometimes, if they’re ready, on their own. I want to be let into this world, and so you encourage me to seek out the pods, like a game—but only the big ones, because you know I’m zealous and clumsy and anxious to please. I gently push aside the flowers, trying my best not to let any petals fall. Beneath their veil exists a lush underworld of earthly delights: an intestinal earthworm, a celestial marble, industrial ants. When I find a pod I use one hand to push aside other floral bits, and the other to carefully grab the emerald jewel between my thumb and pointer finger. The pop and spring of the pod startles then delights me, sends me giggling, and I alight with the spreading of life. Dispersed seeds are all that’s left when the show’s over, like the scattered paper remains after a fireworks display. The sprung pod skins have a caterpillar shape, like a tomato hornworm sleeping in the soil.

Part 3: Planting for the Dead

At the Woodlands, we are encouraged to get our gardening inspiration from Victorian garden aesthetics, the social history of the interred, ecosystem services (such as pollinator plants), and any color combinations that strike our fancy. Seasonal appeal and staggered bloom time is encouraged, as well as a variation of perennials for structure and recurrence, annuals for non-stop blooms during the growing season, foliage texture, and flower shape. But more importantly, we are encouraged to research the occupants, to get to know them beyond the grave, and to plant according to what we may find. For example: for a dentist, white flowers would be an appropriate choice; for a winemaker, perhaps a palette of deep maroons, pinks, and pale yellows; for the town gossip, snapdragons whose flower can be moved like a jaw. 

I tend to two grave gardens, and a total of three deceased: Charles & Sophia (Seffert) Goehman in one, and the nearby Lizzie Seffert.

Charles & Sophia (Seffert) Goehman 

What I know about Sophia (Seffert) Goehman (July 12, 1831 – May 17, 1880) is only through what I know about her husband, as it unjustly went for most women during this time. Charles Goehmann (December 29, 1818 – October 31, 1866) was a prominent furniture maker in Philadelphia, known for working within the Rococo Revival style and his “fancy twist work, for which he was cited by the Franklin Institute in 1844.” (Chipstone) 

Along with the pre existing daffodils, tulips, catmint, lilies, and irises, I decided to mix in tall flowers that grow close to the stem and seem to spiral upwards in honor of his fancy twist work: snapdragons, foxglove, wallflower, flowering tobacco, and butterfly weed. 

Lizzie Seffert

My newest grave garden that I tend to, having only adopted it in 2024, is a work in progress, and a relative of Sophia (Seffert) Goehman. There is little to be found about Lizzie or of her parents, John Seffert and Sophia Caroline Seffert. She died at only 30 years old, buried on April 11, 1868. 

With Lizzie’s grave, I inherited a well-established rose bush. The peach blooms are the color of a sunset and abundant. I’ve yet to plant much around it, as it grows right in the middle with deep roots and spreads towards the front of the bed, leaving not much space or sun, and too much height to plant anything behind it. I’m considering tearing out the invasive euphorbia that grows around the bush and replacing it with impatiens, an annual that grows low to the ground, prefers partial shade, and blooms in abundance—as well as a favorite of my mother’s. 

Suggested Reading:

A Year Gardening the Grave of a Stranger, Sydney Schaedel (2018)

Part 3.5: A Memory

Around me, snapdragons grow in between hostas. Orange and yellow wildflowers shoot out from between the empty sp​​aces in the garden rock pile.The apple tree grows toward the oak, the oak toward the apple, and together their branches form a large heart of sky. A black cat stalks the edges of the yard; a beagle points, tail reaching toward the sun. I continue the hunt while you tend to your vegetable garden, a small plot of land squeezed between our garage and the neighbor’s. You grow cucumbers, squash, and peppers; basil, parsley, and thyme; tomatoes so big I hold one in two hands, licking up the clear pink juice streaming down my wrists as you shake salt into where I bite. You’re out there on hands and knees, curly brown hair falling into your eyes, sunglasses mid-way down your nose, hands massaging the earth—looking how I will look when I grow up. Yelling at the beagle to stop shitting in the basil, to stop deliriously digging into the daffodils. Sweeping your bangs back from your forehead, sweat bejeweling your tanned skin, you turn your head toward the sky. It’s as if you knew they would take you: the soil, your body; the sky, your soul. 

Part 4: The Ending That Awaits Us All

I’ve always found joy in cemeteries, specifically ones that do double-duty as green spaces. There’s an unrivaled, cyclical peace to see the earth bloom out from the dead, to watch the pollinators do their part, to witness a cardinal baptize itself in the bathwater. I spend most Saturday mornings with my grave gardens, picking out the invasive blue mistflower, filling in critter holes, examining worms in the soil, gazing into the throat of the bloom, and reflecting on the memories I’ve incorporated. Deadheading flowers is a task that I particularly relish in, as it allows me to inspect the plant thoroughly while I remove spent blooms to encourage new growth. One morning, while deadheading the flowering tobacco, I think this: even though the dead stay dead, they urge on the living, as if to say, let the dead go and see what grows. 

I feel at peace here, and often think about my mother. I do not visit the cemetery where she is buried on every return to Long Island, because I have yet to understand its significance in how I connect to her. Maybe it could be bringing her flowers that I grow in my grave gardens, or sitting under the nearby cherry blossom and reimagining how I grieve and how I live. But perhaps her grave location is not the connection at all, but the gardening itself, the thing that she taught me from my earliest years alive, and the presence, intention, and care that is demanded of it.

Tending to the grave gardens, I find it confounding that the dead body will burst into the ground and continue to create life, to feed both the earth and soul with the very vessel that once sowed the soil and showed me what it means to be alive. 

Additional Reading:

Grave by Allison C. Meier (2023)
My Garden (Book): by Jamaica Kincaid (2001)
“Pushing Up Daisies: Why Grave Gardening Should be the Latest Gardening Trend” (2020)