Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Expanding our Educational Outreach | Page 5

that “there are also panels that describe con-
temporary Mount Auburn places of burial,
such as Spruce Knoll and Halcyon Gardens.
We also cover the history of cremation at
Mount Auburn, which had the first crema-
tory located in a cemetery in Massachusetts.”
The resource table holds books covering
the many facets of Mount Auburn, including
guides to New England’s birds and trees. Staff
and docents are available to help specialized
groups when needed, for example, showing
videos about bird identification when thou-
sands of bird watchers converge here each
spring during migration season.
School children are one target audience
for the Visitors Center. Students and teach-
ers from a number of schools in the area,
public and private, such as the Haggerty and
Shady Hill Schools in Cambridge and the
Atrium School in Watertown, visit Mount
Auburn on a regular basis, and we hope
they will find the new Center useful. “They
come in on their own, doing lessons that are often nature-
focused, like sketching, bird-watching and looking at turtles
and frogs in the ponds,” Bree says. “But we want to let
more teachers know that we are here and can supplement
what they are covering on virtually any
subject.” Dates of birth and death engraved
on monuments can teach math, the three-
dimensional forms of monuments geometry,
and the horticultural collection biology,
evolution and geography—such as the fact
that many plants native to New England, lo-
cated in the northeastern portion of North
America, are related to plants that live in the
nor theastern portion of Asia, in places such
as Japan and Korea.
What in the Visitors Center will most
surprise first-time and veteran visitors? “It
could be the same answer for both groups,”
Bree says, “the fact that Mount Auburn is
the inspiration for all the public parks in this
country.” Some visitors assume that Fred-
erick Law Olmsted had a hand in shaping
Mount Auburn’s hills, vistas, ponds and
roads, but the reverse might be true, because
the famed landscape architect responsible for
Boston’s Emerald Necklace and New York’s
Central Park was still a boy when Jacob Big-
elow and Henry Dearborn designed this natural landscape
enhanced by art—the first designed landscape open to the
public in North America. The other surprise for many visi-
(Above) Photographs (c. 1870) of Asa Gray Garden, top, and the Sphinx at Bigelow Chapel
(Below) Friends of Mount Auburn members on a guided walk on biodiversity, at the Butterfly Garden near Willow Pond, August 2007 Photo by Jennifer Johnston
Fall 2007 | 3