Memory Blooms this Memorial Day

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Oak Hill Cemetery in Lawrence, Kansas, was created in 1865 in the fashion of the garden or rural landscaped cemetery first introduced in the 1830s in the eastern United States.

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Memorial Day rolls around in May every year, prompting annual visits to family gravesites with decorations in hand. Folks fill their cars with the best blooms from their gardens—peonies, irises and a few precious roses bound with twine and filled with sprigs of sage and artemisia.

Some pack milk jugs full of water, odd assortments of foil-wrapped tin cans and sometimes even bring a picnic lunch. And young and old, they make a day of it, in the cemeteries where loved ones who have passed on are buried. In doing so, they repeat a ritual their parents and grandparents performed before them, often using the same kinds of flowers, to renew important ties between two worlds. For a few days, the old country cemeteries, often overgrown, look well-tended again, even merry.

A legal holiday in most states, Memorial Day was named a holiday officially in 1868 as a Civil War commemorative. Prior to that it was celebrated by some as Decoration Day. Now, all war dead are remembered, as well as other deceased family members. In part, this holiday helped bring flowers back into the cemeteries, and to funeral services, too, particularly in the northeastern United States where Puritans had frowned on such frivolities.

Flowers in Memoriam

According to Jack Goody in The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge University Press, 1993), the Puritans of colonial New England were following a practice that traces to the 5th century in Europe when flowers at funerals or on graves were taboo. Because they were associated with pagan worship, early Christians banned flowers from all occasions. Later, Catholic and Anglican church members brought blooms back into the houses of worship as a way to communicate with the divine world, but the Puritans’ determination to avoid them remains evident in their old cemeteries today.

In post-Elizabethan England, floral gravesite tributes slowly made an evergreen comeback. Cypress garlands began to decorate upper class graves, Goody says, while rosemary and bay served more common folk and blossoms soon followed.

By the dawn of the 20th century in the United States, flowers were mainstays at funerals, and for Memorial Day. Mostly, funeral flowers were greenhouse grown, and Memorial Day tributes were homemade bouquets right out of Grandmother’s garden, but that wasn’t always the case. In the spring of 1909 in Ottawa, Kansas, Alice Washburn died following her daughter Hazel’s wedding. Washburn’s husband, George, an architect who built 15 Kansas courthouses, held his wife’s funeral at their home, still decorated with Hazel’s wedding flowers.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print