Flowers of the field...

Today's cemeteries are very different than old ones like the Reilly Cemetery. In the 1880s it became fashionable to design cemeteries in such a way that mechanical means could be used to maintain grasses. Before then families would tend the graves of their dead on a fairly regular basis (maybe after church?) and being in the cemetery was fairly social. Some put iron or wood fences around graves, often graves were mounded up (especially early ones or those whose family could not afford a headstone), and planting flowering shrubs or perennials was pretty common. Modern cemeteries often have trees or shrubs in them but you don't often see the enclosures and mounds that get in the way of easy mowing. Around the turn of the century there apparently was a push to remove a lot of these features from graveyards to make it easier to maintain the grass. Makes sense but it made a lot of the distinguishing features disappear. Reilly cemetery is fairly level in much of its area and may have been smoothed to enable easier maintenance. Other areas appear to be considerably rougher and may not have been changed at all. I don't know what I will find in those areas just yet but there are a fair number of headstone bases in the rougher areas so we can be pretty sure there are people buried there.

That having been said traces have been left behind and these are very easy to see indeed. I'm referring to the plants that people used to decorate the graves of the dead. There are old tree stumps that might have shaded the cemetery in general but there are also flowering shrubs of several varieties, several large patches of lilies, and roses. The roses are thick and abundant and quite the barrier to the curious archaeology/history type person. I'm recording the location of the larger bits and have noticed a pattern developing where there is very little indeed in the centre and near the old entrance on the west side, but this central open area is flanked by three large flowering shrubs on one side and lilies on the other. These shrubs and lilies do not occur in the fields surrounding the cemetery. The roses are busy spreading out in all directions, including into the farmer's field, and are doing their very best to survive despite the deep shade of the pine trees planted in the 1980s. I've been keeping an eye out for plants of which I am not familiar and there have been a few new ones on me--and I've been gardening for a quarter century now. The roses are different to the wild roses with which I am familiar and remind me a great deal of an apothecary rose, but I will have to wait until they bloom and compare it to the apothecary in my garden. Towards the road there are honeysuckle, wild plum and hawthorn bushes. Hawthorne is not indigenous as far as I know, and was often planted in the Victorian era (edit June 12, 2012, apparently hawthore IS indigenous). Honeysuckle is an old fashioned favourite but you can still buy it easily enough at garden centres, but this bush is a fair size so it's not a young plant.

It must have been very pretty there years ago with the roses and lilies, honeysuckle and wild plum atop the hill with a view all around.