The graves of loved ones and luminaries are enough to attract visitors to the Grove Street Cemetery. But this 18-acre oasis in the middle of the city has long held another appeal: its trees. The cemetery now carries the official designation of a Level I Accredited Arboretum, and a self-guided tour brochure will help you find 40 species of trees, both familiar and foreign, that shade the cemetery’s wide paths and hidden nooks.
Spring is an especially beautiful time to visit, while many of the arboretum’s plants are flaunting their blossoms. Others are just beginning to leaf out. On a stroll with filmmaker Karyl Evans—who created the tour with fellow New Haven Garden Club member Marilyn Elsworth as part of the UConn Extension Master Gardener Certification Program—and landscape architect Channing Harris, I found the colors of the season at every turn. A saucer magnolia (Magnolia x soulangiana) was decked in pink and white, leaving its cupped petals on the walkway like a trailing veil. A flowering dogwood (Cornus florida / Benthamidia florida) bloomed pink on some branches, green-white on others. Even those not on the official tour lent color and fragrance to the walk: A weeping cherry tree sprayed its pale pink blossoms like water from a fountain, and the heady scent of purple lilacs wafted across our path.
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These showy specimens may be the first to catch your eye, but the brochure can lead you to many more subtle discoveries along the way. Horticultural descriptions along with sketches of leaf shapes help you identify each tree or shrub, while signs on the specimens themselves tell cultural tales. For example, the sign on an English hawthorn (Crataegus laevigata) on Hawthorn Avenue notes that the tree’s thorns help protect it from grazing cattle, and hawthorns were often planted in the British Isles as de facto fencing. “You can imagine if you’re trying to do a hedgerow and you plant them close together, their prickly branches intertwine and keep the cows in the pasture, or the sheep,” Harris says. He adds that hawthorns were frequently planted in British churchyards. As a board member of the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery for over a decade, Harris also happens to know this particular hawthorn was planted by former longtime cemetery superintendents Bill and Joan Cameron.
The brochure denotes some old favorites including a sugar maple (Acer saccharum), dangling its tiny, bell-shaped blooms beside baby leaves, and a white oak (Quercus alba), famous in these parts as the species of the legendary Charter Oak. But more unusual specimens are also on view. A distinctive Blue Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca’) with small clusters of silver-blue needles extends its branches as if to embrace the “Cedar Ave” sign marking one of the cemetery’s many botanically named walkways. Farther down that route, a dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) reaches one assertive root toward the path. It’s not so tall yet, but Harris says it may grow to 100 feet. The juxtaposition of ordinary and uncommon on the tour is intentional, Evans says. She wants visitors to be able to compare the trees we see all around us—to “go back and forth and really see what the differences
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We paused at the west end of Hawthorn Avenue to look up into a tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), one of the cemetery’s tallest and likely oldest specimens. “The blooms tend to be higher,” Evans says, “so a lot of times you’ll walk right by it, and you’ll see the blooms on the ground…
Many of these botanical forms are carved on the gravestones around us: ivy, lilies, weeping willow, palm leaves, oak leaves with acorns. Dogwoods are popular for supposedly being the wood from which Christ’s cross was hewn, Harris says. “The legend is, ever since, the flower has four petals
Grove Street’s collection evolved partly by intention and partly by accident. Families have often selected plants for their plots, but Harris speculates most of the trees were planted by staff. Periodic replantings have been funded by gifts and by the Friends of the Grove Street Cemetery. Harris pointed to a ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) on the tour that was part of a plan drawn up by the well-known landscape architect Diana Balmori. Harris himself is responsible for a project to replace a 700-foot-long privet hedge in the front border along the iron fence with new plantings. That area, he says, has been reserved for plantings, not burials, since the cemetery’s opening in 1798.
“When you get in here, you just have no idea how much is in here,” Evans says. She had an idea herself because in 2007, she spent a year working on a film about the cemetery and its history. In fact, Grove Street’s collection is the most complete arboretum open to the public in Greater New Haven, Harris says. It’s also what he calls an “ecological reservoir” for birds, butterflies, bees and “many niches of wildlife.”
While the next few weeks are a great time to visit, so is autumn, when leaves take over as the colorful showpieces. In fact, almost any day is a good day to visit because as the seasons change, so do the plants. “We could come back tomorrow,” Harris says, “and see 10 things we had not seen today.”
Grove Street Cemetery
227 Grove St, New Haven (map)
Daily 9am-4pm (last entry 3:30pm)
(203) 787-1443 | office@grovestreetcemetery.org
www.grovestreetcemetery.org
Written and photographed by Kathy Leonard Czepiel. Image 1 features a saucer magnolia in the distance. Image 2 features Channing Harris (standing) and Karyl Evans (seated). Image 3 features an engraved weeping willow. Image 4 features a weeping cherry tree. This updated story was originally published on May 4, 2021.
