Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Healing and Meditative Landscape | Page 10

Floras of Eastern
North America
& East Asia
Written By Dennis Collins, Horticultural Curator
Illustrations by Sarah Roche
Stewartia ovata (above) and Stewartia koreana (below)
8 | Sweet Auburn
By now, most people in New England are
familiar with the Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum). It has
become one of the staples in our region’s horticultural
landscape. Perhaps some of us only vaguely sense that it’s
related to our native Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) or the
now ubiquitous “invasive species” the Norway Maple
(Acer platanoides). We generally leave it to the botanical
taxonomists to keep track of the details about what makes
them different.
One hundred and fifty years ago, when the Japanese
Maple first arrived in Boston as an exotic novelty, our
local authority on all things botanical, Professor Asa
Gray—of the (now defunct) Cambridge Botanic Gardens
at Harvard—was there to help everyone understand the
significance of its arrival. In the mid-nineteenth century,
hundreds of plant species that had never before been seen
in the West were arriving here on merchant ships from
Japan, Korea, and China. It was a pivotal moment in the
history of horticulture in this country. Professor Gray, who
later earned the title “father of American botany,” was in
the right place at the right time. He made the most of his
opportunity and delivered some profound insights on the
origins and relationships of plant species around the world.
Although Mount Auburn Cemetery received plants from
a variety of sources during this period, it made a rather
serious investment by commissioning its own shipload of
plants from Tokyo in 1896. Some plants from that shipment
can still be found in the landscape today. In the century
and a half that followed, our landscape continued to benefit
from plants that came here from Asia: Forsythia, Flowering
Cherries, Hinoki Cypress, Quince, Azaleas, Magnolias, and
Lilies, to name just a few.
Today at Mount Auburn, the Asa