Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Dynamic and Evolving Landscape | Page 26

People and Happenings

Dave Barnett receives new
Horticultural Honor
The Garden Club of Ame rica (GCA) awarde d
its Distinguished Service Medal to Mount Auburn
Cemetery’s President & CEO Dave Barnett at the GCA
Annual Meeting in Minneapolis in May. According to
the GCA’s official announcement, “Dr. David Barnett is
dedicated to ecological, historically sensitive improvements
at the 175-acre Mount Auburn Cemetery.”
In honoring Dave, the GCA hailed his “many notable
accomplishments in the horticultural world, his significant
impact on Mount Auburn Cemetery’s approach to its
landscape’s treasured past and future sustainability and

his passionate advocacy for the
community of public gardens and
their supporters.”
Laura Nash of the Cambridge
Plant & Garden Club nominated
Barnett for the award, which was
supported by letters from the heads
of six major public gardens as well
as a celebrated landscape designer.

Clockwise from the top: Dave speaks at the Garden Club of America’s Annual
Meeting, Dave with wife Eileen in Minneapolis, and Dave with wife Eileen
Barnett and Laura Nash.

Local Students Release Tadpoles
Shady Hill School Scie nce teache r Michae l
Horn has teamed up with Herpetologist Joe Martinez
for the last 2 years to encourage local sixth-graders to
observe and record the process of tadpole development at
Mount Auburn Cemetery. With American Toads breeding
at the Cemetery over the last 3 years, it has been possible
for students to collect a small number of toad tadpoles
to then raise in an aquarium back in their classrooms.
After observing and recording the process of tadpole
development through metamorphosis, students return to
the Cemetery to release all of the toadlets and tadpoles to
the same water body where they were collected.
24 | Sweet Auburn