Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Connecting the Present with the Past | Page 21

sweet auburn | 2019 volume i
MEMBER FEATURE:
Alan Emmet
By Anna Moir
Grants & Communications Manager
L
ongtime Friends member and
landscape historian Alan Emmet of
Westford, MA, has nurtured a relationship
with the Cemetery that has evolved from
enthusiastic neighbor to academic to
active supporter of our horticultural and
environmental initiatives. Simultaneously,
her own gardening philosophies have helped
shape Mount Auburn’s landscape as we know
it today.
Alan’s connection to the Cemetery began
in the early 1950s, as a newlywed living
across the street with her husband, lawyer
and environmental advocate Richard Emmet
(1924–2007). In the 1970s, after moving to
their historic farm in Westford, Alan attended
Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and
developed a new appreciation for Mount
Auburn while studying both the history of
Cambridge’s landscape and the rural cemetery
movement. “It made [the Cemetery] more
significant to me, to know why it was done,
and the men who started it. (It was all men in
those days),” she recalled. “It really preceded
the [urban] park movement…. The idea of the
Emerald Necklace and all that really came
after.”
Also in the 1970s, Claude Benoit began
working both for Mount Auburn, where he
eventually became Director of Horticulture,
and for the Emmets in the gardens they
developed around their home. It was while
working for Alan and Richard that Claude
learned principles that help define Mount
Auburn’s horticultural practices today. The
Emmets were passionate about organic
gardening as early as the 1950s, a time when,
in Alan’s words, “everybody was dumping
poison everywhere.” Through the Emmets,
Claude learned organic practices that he
later worked to expand at Mount Auburn.
Additionally, it was there that Claude first
worked with perennial plants, rather than
the annuals that were in common use at
Mount Auburn at the time. By the time Dave
Barnett arrived in 1993, Claude had become
a perennial expert and was helping increase
their usage, particularly groundcover
plantings to replace mowed turf—something
that has increasingly defined our landscape.
Today, Alan is unable to visit the
Cemetery as frequently, but she stays in
close touch about our landscape initiatives.
A lesson learned by both Alan and Mount
Auburn’s staff is that landscape preservation
is very different from that of buildings and
monuments. Because landscapes evolve
naturally, the goal is to cultivate plants
that create a narrative appropriate for the
space’s history without following a strict
template. In her Westford gardens, Alan
learned to preserve an overall vision while
incorporating practical needs and her own
life experiences and discoveries. Dave
Barnett described Mount Auburn’s approach
similarly: “It’s not status quo that we’re
committed to, the exact same plants in the
exact same spot that were here in 1831…. It’s
rather that what we’re trying to preserve is
the founding vision—a beautiful, tranquil,
inspirational place that people want to be
buried at, or want to come birding at and
visit, and everything in-between.” From
Consecration Dell to Asa Gray Garden, as at
Alan’s home, this is a vision to which we all
continue to adapt, one season after another.
Claude Benoit, Mount Auburn’s
former Director of Horticulture; his
wife, Linda, and Alan at the ribbon-
cutting ceremony for Asa Gray
Garden in the summer of 2018 (top),
Dave Barnett and Alan in December
2018.
19