American Arcadia: Mount Auburn Cemetery and the Nineteenth-Century Landscape Tradition

Abstract

Environmental thought in nineteenth-century America has often been dismissed: either it was strictly utilitarian, or it was oriented exclusively toward wilderness, or it was a naïve, nostalgic form of pastoralism. But some evidence supports the flowering of a landscape tradition in the antebellum period that was characterized by a simultaneous engagement with mortality and with the immediate environmental context of ordinary life, by an ecological ethic based on humility, finitude, and integration. The Boston horticulturists who established Mount Auburn, the first garden-style urban cemetery, in 1831, were making a spatial argument about natural limitations. The fantastic success of Mount Auburn then went on to spur a national movement bent on incorporating public green spaces, sites of shadiness, in cities. Until the 1860s, when “the trouble with wilderness” really began, American arcadians of all classes planted gardens next to the graves of their kin and established a new kind of kinship with the land.