A sustainable experiment to let parts of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery grow wild is yet another example of how meticulously mowed lawns are falling out of fashion.
Other historic cemeteries are seeing how they can reduce their carbon emissions, too. Cincinnati’s Spring Grove opened seven years after Green-Wood and became the home of the first “lawn plan,”and was adopted throughout the country. But now, according to Dave Gressley, its director of horticulture, they plant sedge, which requires little mowing, wherever possible, one plug at a time. They’re also working to rebuild their canopy after the loss of hundreds of mature trees to disease and storms.
This and the other meadows look unplanned—a little wooly in parts, tidier in others—but Charap and Rossi say they require more attention and foresight than simply mowing. Weed control is still employed twice a year to keep invasives at bay. Instead of a monoculture, Bermudagrass now blends in with native grasses like fescue, bluestem and Kentucky bluegrass.
At the same time, the cemetery offered relief during crisis. As the city went into lockdown, access to greenspace felt like a boon. It was as if Green-Wood, which had been the model for New York’s first parks and was said to rival Niagara Falls as America’s most popular destination, was reborn—a refuge for the living as much as the dead. Roughly 110,000 people came through its four gates in May 2020, almost triple the same month in 2019.
Education has become central to their work. Rossi, though technically off the hook at the end of last year, is beginning a new chapter at Green-Wood. He and Charap are planning an Urban Grasslands Institute that will occupy space in a, where they’ll share land-management techniques with climate-change researchers, city parks managers, homeowners—a place to continue rethinking the American lawn.
Green-Wood’s canopy has changed in the past century, both due to its human stewards and natural events like hurricanes. Photos: Green-Wood Cemetery; Purbita Saha
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