Mount Auburn: Fortunate coincidences and an ideal solution

Abstract

In New England the Puritan alphabet book began with Adam's fall, and the history of the Puritan settlers began with near starvation. Because food crops like Indian maize were planted not in gardens but in fields where men laboured, gardens developed in the New World only when men and women had time left over from basic farming. In other words, colonial gardens were a luxury that produced fruits, flowers, or vegetables to please the senses but not to sustain life. But by the eighteenth century in Boston, gentlemen like Governor Bellingham and Thomas Hancock had fine gardens with large houses and ample grounds that were being admired as estates. Before the Boston Tea Party, wealthy Gardiner Green and Andrew Faneuil had built greenhouses, and soon after Independence Kirk Boott, brother of London botanist Dr Francis Boott, was growing orchids, a flower that is still today associated with luxury. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, enterprising young men outside the big cities were developing nurseries to supply the growing number of middle-class families that had leisure time and extra money to ornament their property with fragrant flowers and exotic trees. It was such families for whom the concept of a rural cemetery had a special appeal. Because they grew plants for pleasure and saw nature as a blessing not an adversary, the Bostonians who started Mount Auburn Cemetery were more like us than like their stem ancestors.