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A Haven for Lost Roses
The Old City Cemetery of Sacramento
by
Gregg Lowery
Vintage Gardens
(Published Summer 2005)
“You've got to visit that garden!” she said, her blue
eyes lit with the cold fire of an old‑rose collector.
"It just keeps going and going, every path more
beautiful than the last." Pamela regaled us a year ago
with verbal portraits of the Sacramento City Cemetery
and its Historic Rose Collection. Like so many beautiful
gardens that friends recommend to me, this one I filed
in my mental catalog of places I'd love to see, but
don't know when I'll find the time to get to during our
hectic spring season. What a fool I was!
We all
of us take gardens a bit for granted, saving up our
‘garden miles’ for that magical trip to Sissinghurst
Castle or Sangerhausen which we dream will come one day.
We tend to think that the really special ones will be
the ones we read about in books. Never do we imagine
that the greatest treasures will be found among those
places here, on our home ground. But, find it we did,
when Phillip and I traveled with Pamela and Michael
Temple to the Historic Sacramento City Cemetery this
spring.
Barbara Oliva, who oversees this volunteer‑tended rose
garden, met us in the early afternoon of a clear and
fragrant day in late April at the gates to this 1850s
garden‑cemetery. Only late on that day, when fatigue and
hunger drove us from that elegant and profoundly
beautiful place, did I curse our tardy arrival. A day is
just not enough time to spend in this great garden.
The
cemetery perches on an undulating knoll at the crook of
a bend in the Sacramento River; in fact the highest
point in Old Sacramento is there. The grid of plots was
laid out in the 1850s as a grand, high‑Victorian
cemetery, a lush and shady retreat for the community on
a Sunday afternoon. Today this grid of raised plots of
stone, brick and old concrete forms an elegant garden
structure on a great scale. The plots rise up making
tiers of leveled, square ‘garden beds,’ that march up
and down the rolling terrain. Antique statuary,
cenotaphs, neoclassical tombs, ornate iron palings and
gateways and glorious Victorian follies inhabit this
grid like an ancient, silent city. Their companions are
the trees and flowers once planted here, now huge and
venerable. The roses spill from the crisp edges, foam up
and drape against follies, arch into neighboring trees
and cascade down. At their feet, in the fertile soil,
dense colonies of bearded iris pack the tidy plots.
Daffodils, daylilies, fragrant diathus abound. As we
walked the ten acres of garden, we were pressed to think
of a family of garden plants that was missing in this
rich and textured planting.
We
find traces of old garden cemeteries everywhere we
travel, from the cramped little city churchyard, of
Charleston to the great wilderness of Le Cimetière du
Père Lachaise, the so called 'lungs' of Paris. While
the stones often remain intact, the garden is rarely
more than a thin memory, mostly old roses, scattered and
clinging to life despite neglect. So it is extraordinary
to encounter a cemetery garden as alive and vibrant with
beauty as it could have been 150 years ago. Suddenly
life and beauty abound in this place of the dead. The
silent inhabitants and their simple histories seem to
speak through the roses.
As we
ambled along the grassy paths, encountering old rose, we
know, and old roses we had never met, Barbara shared
their stories with its, and the story of how they came
to be in this place. Encouraged by the renowned
collector of old roses, Fred Boutin, a proposal to
restore roses to the Old City Cemetery put forth to the
City of Sacramento and the cemetery's board of
directors. The idea was to plant a good portion of
Fred's rose foundlings from historic California sites.
Many of these were unidentified, and many only
tentatively named. Barbara, an early volunteer to this
project, found herself after a few years the curator,
and to this day she is the captain and driving force.
Today
over 400 old found roses call this garden home. It is
the haven they deserve and a more fitting place could
not be found in which to assemble these great beauties,
our California rose heritage. The development of this
cemetery back to its origin as a garden owes credit to
not only the Heritage Rose Group that initially
sponsored it and today provides so many willing
volunteers, but also to similar efforts by the
California Native Plant Society and the Perennial Plant
Society. Both of these groups have sponsored the care of
large sections of the cemetery, and their plantings are
equally remarkable and of exceptionally high quality.
Our
public gardens and arboreta receive Support from states
and municipalities, and many private gardens open to the
public are likewise endowed in order to preserve our
garden heritage. But it is rare to encounter a garden
the likes of these ten acres of cemetery; this
combination of history and plants will be found nowhere
else in America today, and is the invention and the work
of volunteers. We urge you to put this garden high on
your list of places to visit. And we sound the cry to
all who dream of owning a magnificent garden of old
roses to join those who own this garden, the Volunteers
of the Sacramento Historic Rose Garden. Save a rose,
gain a year of your life!
To
lend a hand, visit their website at
www.cemeteryrose.org.
To
read more about this garden, order a copy of
California's Rose Heritage from the Heritage Rose
Foundation's website,
www.heritagerosefoundation.org.
Webmaster Note: please visit
www.VintageGardens.com
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