Visions of Nature in the Dell Part I: The Ecological Landscape
By Jena Tegeler
Consecration Dell evokes a distinct sensory experience for its visitors today. Unlike the open curving roads, sprawling lawns, and sun-dappled groves in the rest of the cemetery, the Dell is shadier, darker, and more hushed. Enveloped by the steep slopes of the glacially-formed kettle pond, one’s attention is drawn inward; a lens that focuses us on the cycles of animal and plant life within. The diverse and mature woodland lends us to believe that this portion of the land is more historic, perhaps little changed from the early days of the Cemetery. Looking back at the Cemetery’s founding documents, however, we see that the landscape has endured many shifts since that time. In early images and documents, the imagination of the Dell was heavily influenced by picturesque landscape aesthetics. Today’s visions are still products of a natural romanticism, but are also guided by ideas of ecological horticulture. These changes in the naturalistic design imagination, as seen in the microcosm of the Dell, reflect larger changes in environmental values, and allow for reflections on contemporary landscape practices
When the founders of Mount Auburn joined with the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1831 to create a rural cemetery and experimental garden, they promoted the idea that a natural setting--and in particular a forested landscape--was a supremely suitable place for the burial of their dead. This imagination of a this forested setting moved the horticulturists, landscape architects, engineers, and other Boston elite who would come to shape it, as they sought to create a new kind of landscape. It was a space that would allow city dwellers to contain the beauty of nature and the images of rural life that were portrayed in romantic paintings, and experience them in a nearby setting that was embellished and adorned through picturesque landscape design and horticulture.
The picturesque is a design ideology guided by controlled naturalism: natural forms, shapes, and patterns are utilized, but these elements are highly edited to create specific views through the appropriate placement of landscape elements.1 This highly curated representation of a “natural” landscape was exemplified in the space of Consecration Dell in particular, where the landscape gives the impression of being simply found, yet it has been modified, designed, and shaped into a highly pictorial scene.
As early plans for the creation of Mount Auburn Cemetery coalesced, its founders fixed on a plot of land called ‘Sweet Auburn’, formerly ‘Stone’s Woods’2. “Little will be required from the hand of art to fit it for that purpose. Nature has already done almost all that is required”3 Despite this statement from Henry Dearborn--founder of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society--on the fortuitous conditions of Sweet Auburn, much was to be done in the way of engineering, horticulture, and design on the Cemetery grounds. The understory woody plants were to be cleared out, the avenues had to be built, and plantings of bulbs and flowers had to be installed.4
As for the network of wetlands on site, these were to be: “converted into picturesque sheets of water, and their margins diversified by clumps and belts of our most splendid native flowering trees, and shrubs”5
Additionally, the curving avenues were crucial to the sculpting of the land towards a picturesque effect.6 This form of embellished nature was seen by advocates of the rural cemetery as a reprieve from the crowded and dirty realm of the urban core of Boston,7 and yet it was a landscape that was perhaps no less constructed, no less urbanized than the city itself.
Joseph Story delivered his famous Consecration Address to a crowd in the Dell on its founding day in 1831. Following this point, the Dell was often referred to as an amphitheater, perhaps reminiscent of the ancient landscapes that Story had referred to in his address. He called upon a series of ancient burial practices in the speech, proclaiming the value of an idealized natural setting for the sanctity of burial. He noted that the ancient Greeks, “discouraged interments within the limits of their cities; and consigned their relics to shady groves, in the neighborhood of murmuring streams, and mossy fountains.”8
For architectural historian Arthur Krim, the Dell expresses the height of picturesque design in the Cemetery, because it is a space that provides shady contrast to the open, ecstatic views of the tower.9
Engravings of the Cemetery were produced in the numerous guidebooks that emerged in the late 19th century, such as The Picturesque Pocket Companion. These drawings furthered the idea of Mount Auburn’s natural features providing a distinctly pictorial beauty. The guidebooks often outlined a sequence of arrival and procession, with visits to various monuments and paths. This mode of enjoyment recalled the techniques of English designers such as William Kent, who introduced ideas of expectation and theatricality to his estate gardens.10
Beyond the initial inspirations and visions for the Dell, physical changes were made to its landscape in the first decades after its consecration. The pond’s edge, like other water bodies in the Cemetery, was a notable element that could be manipulated for greater visual effect.11 In the late 1800s, the shore of the natural pool at the Dell’s base was lined with granite,12 giving it a hard contrasting edge that could be read as a curving geometry outlining the natural contours of the grounds. While the granite was later removed from the pool’s edge in 1877, the bare grassy edge of the pond remained free of much vegetation in photographs and drawings representing the Dell until very recently.
Maintenance and plant care decisions across the Cemetery were informed by these same aesthetic considerations. The grounds were meant to be cleared of understory and untamed plant material and maintained like a park in order to express the “airiness, grace, and luxuriance of growth, which good taste demands.”13 For Cornelia Walter, a prominent Boston newspaper editor, shrubs were not meant to be planted too closely together, for fear that they take on the appearance of weeds.14 This spare aesthetic was sometimes in conflict with an emerging interest in horticulture among individual lot owners. In 1856, the proprietors petitioned for a greenhouse to be built so that plants ill-adapted to the cold climate could be stored through the winter.15 Debates emerged over just how much vegetation could be added to the Cemetery’s landscape. By 1860, for Cemetery founder Jacob Bigelow, the growing density of trees had become a ”serious evil” as the existing canopy multiplied over time. For him, the character of the Cemetery would be improved by having far fewer trees to maintain areas of open vistas and lower plant material.16
This yearning towards a cleaner, less cluttered landscape style eventually won out in the 1870s with the emergence of the Landscape Lawn style, which discouraged heavily planted lots, iron fences, and excessive monuments.17 The smooth surface of a clean lawn, and the comparative lack and diversity of plant life in several images of the Dell display these qualities.
Walking on the heavily vegetated slopes of the Dell today, where leaves fall and remain through the winter, and aquatic plants coat the surface of the pond, it is hard to imagine the stark and sterile open space evident in former images of this landscape. And yet, the architects and writers of that time attached a great deal of emotional and spiritual importance to the expressions of beauty rendered through the Cemetery’s design.18 These images reveal a complex design history, in which European ideas about naturalistic scenery played out in the development of a new urban landscape.
This two-part article was made possible with a grant from Stanley Smith Horticultural Trust (SSHT). In 2022 and 2023, Jena Tegeler consulted on the landscape design of the native planting enhancements on Violet Path in the Dell which was also supported by SSHT in addition to grants from the A.J. & M.D. Ruggiero Trust, the Richard Saltonstall Charitable Foundation, and individual contributions.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 “Picturesque,” History of Early American Landscape Design, National Gallery of Art, accessed October 17, 2023, https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php/Picturesque.
2 Nathaniel Dearborn, Guide Through Mount Auburn Cemetery, 3d ed. (Boston: Printed at his engraving, plate and type printing establishment, 1849) 1.
3 Massachusetts Horticultural Society, “An Account of the Proceedings in Relation to the Experimental Garden and the Cemetery of Mount Auburn,” in A Discourse delivered before the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, on the Celebration of its Fourth Anniversary (Cambridge: E.W. Metcalf and Company, 1832) 70.
4 Henry Dearborn for the Committee, “Proceedings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society,” in An Address pronounced before the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Commemoration of Its Third Annual Festival (Boston: J.T. & E. Buckingham, 1831) 47.
5 Dearborn, “Proceedings of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society,” 48.
6 As noted in the appendix of: Joseph Story, An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount Auburn (Boston: Joseph T. & Edwin Buckingham, 1831), 29.
7 One of the primary founders of the cemetery, Jacob Bigelow, shared this sentiment widely in his text: Jacob Bigelow, “On The Burial of the Dead.” in Nature in Disease Illustrated in Various Discourses and Essays: To which are Added Miscellaneous Writings, Chiefly on Medical Subjects, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), 193-194.
8 Joseph Story, An Address Delivered on the Dedication of the Cemetery at Mount Auburn, 9.
9 Arthur J. Krim, “The Origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery: Design Process 1820-1835“ (unpublished manuscript, 1983) 18.
10 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Henry N. Abrams, 2001), 240.
11 For example, Cornelia Walter writes of the water bodies which have been modified “as to present a pleasant feature in this widespread extent of forest loveliness” Cornelia W. Walter, Mount Auburn Illustrated (New York: Martin and Johnson, 1848), 14. 12 “Granite Curbing Used to Edge Ponds and Ornamental Areas,” Mount Auburn Cemetery, https://www.mountauburn.org/granite-curbing-used-to-edge-ponds
13 Henry Dearborn for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, “An Account of the Proceedings in Relation to the Experimental Garden and the Cemetery of Mount Auburn,” 84.
14 Walter, Mount Auburn Illustrated, 16.
15 Shary Page Berg, Mount Auburn Cemetery 1993 Master Plan, Volume II: Historic Landscape Report (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 26.
16 Jacob Bigelow, A history of the cemetery of Mount Auburn (Boston and Cambridge: J. Munroe and Company, 1860), 119-121.
17 Berg, Mount Auburn Cemetery 1993 Master Plan, Volume II: Historic Landscape Report, 31-33.
18 See for example, Wilson Flagg’s ideas concerning the use of particular landscape aesthetics that have the potential to heighten the feeling of “solemnity” within the visitor, in Wilson Flagg, Mount Auburn: its scenes, its beauties, and its lessons (Boston, Cambridge: J. Munroe and Company, 1861) 72-77.