Historic Oakland Cemetery

Now that Jim and I have the time, we are visiting sites nearby. For years, when vacation time was restricted, we tended to visit far away places, so we really do not know well many of the interesting sites around us. One of these sites is the Historic Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta. This is a 48 acre "rural garden" cemetery that was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. It was designed as a rural garden cemetery, a concept imported from France, which started in this country in the mid 1830s. It is located only five blocks east of the State Capitol Building in Atlanta.

I am not a "tombstone tourist" but after touring three notable cemeteries I think that they are great places to visit and good links to our past. The word "cemetery" comes from the French "cimetière", which comes from the Greek word koimeterion meaning "a place to sleep". The first large historical cemetery I visited was a few years ago with my daughter Jessica, in Paris, le Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, which has over 5300 trees (it was the first private cemetery ever created, in 1804.) She was interested in seeing Jim Morrison's grave who is interred there. We found it and could see by all the flowers on the grave that many other visitors had been by, too. It is a huge cemetery with many famous people buried there, like Oscar Wilde, Bizet, Modigliani, Molière, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, (click on picture for larger size)






Balzac

Chopin

Marcel Proust , and many others.

The second large cemetery Jim and I visited was the Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. I believe this to be one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the United States. It has invitingly laid-out paths, large avenues with gigantic live oaks draped with Spanish moss and graceful statuary.


In the Victorian era, cemeteries used to be favorite places to visit. Families went there to have picnics and carriage rides - it was very fashionable. Some cemeteries, in England, were so renowned that admissions tickets were sold (a profitable business!). Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, founded in 1840 had, by 1860, 1/2 million visitors a year. The Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta was popular then and still today thousands of tourists, locals and students visit it.


This fountain named "Out in the Rain" is a replica of a fountain made for the 1876 US Centennial in Philadelphia.


Oakland Cemetery was founded in 1850 on 6 acres. By 1867, it had grown to 48 acres in order to accommodate the burial of 7,000 Civil War soldiers.

(click here for larger size)

Also interred on the grounds is Robert Tyre Jones (1902-1971) a.k.a "Bobby Jones", generally considered one of the greatest amateur golfer extant. He co-founded and co-designed the National Golf Club in Augusta, site of the famous Masters Tournament. Click on the picture to see all the golf balls laid by fans by the headstone.

Another notable person buried here is Margaret Mitchell Marsh (1900-1949) who wrote the best-seller and Pulitzer Prize winner "Gone with the Wind". She was often seen riding her pony on the grounds of this antebellum cemetery.

The grave that moved me the most, maybe because it was so simple, by itself on the grass, with just flowers and a purple ribbon, was Maynard Jackson's (1938-2003). He was the first African American mayor of Atlanta, first elected in 1973 and re-elected 2 more times. I saw him often on television and still listen now to his wife's show, Valerie Jackson's "Between the Lines" a book review show on our local NPR station.

"Death twitches my ear. 'Live' he says. 'I am coming." -Virgil, Roman Poet, 70-19 BC.

Swan House and Atlanta History Center

Years ago when my mother came to visit us, we went to the Swan House in Buckhead and visited it. A couple of weeks ago, on a sunny day, Jim and I decided to go back to the Swan House gardens and see if anything had changed. We did not go inside the house but we saw a new museum on the grounds had been built, one of the largest history museum in the Southeast. The whole complex sits on 33 acres in north Atlanta. This house was built in 1928 by an heir to a cotton brokerage fortune, Mr. Edward Inman. His wife lived on the property until 1965 and then it was sold to the Atlanta History Center with most of its original 18th to 20th century's antiques and furnishings. The house was named the Swan House because Mrs. Inman was fascinated by these birds and had the birds represented in many rooms (wall paper, many object d'art, etc.)


The architect, Philip T. Shutze who had studied extensively in Rome, Italy, chose a classical Italian style for the house. The rear of the house is quite impressive also.


On the grounds, behind the Swan House, you can walk down a trail, come to a waterfall and little pond set in a garden containing benches
and life size metal sculptures of animals.

Continuing up the trail one arrives very shortly at the Tullie Smith Farm. This plantation house was built in 1840 and moved from nearby DeKalb County to this site. The Tullie Smith Farm consists of a farmhouse, a vegetable, herb and flower garden, a separate open-hearth kitchen, a smokehouse, a barn complete with animals, a rural pioneer log cabin and a blacksmith shop.



Click on the picture of the barn, upper right, where two sheep are eating. There are three Gulf Coast breed sheep living in this barn (one of the oldest breed in the United States). The two ewes are named Poppy and Peaches and the ram is named Napoleon.

The farm is more representative of the type of plantation houses there were in the South in that era rather than the lavish antebellum type plantations seen in the movies. The original owners of the farm, The Robert Smith Family, had 800 acres around their farm of which 200 acres were cultivated, including cotton.



Back tracking to the Swan House Gardens we walk by many Georgian indigenous wild flowers and native species of plants


and arrive at the formal boxwood gardens bordering a classical fountain.



Further still, we go around a stone elephant and keep walking along the shaded paths. It is hard to imagine that the vibrant Buckhead businesses and international restaurants and hotels are just a few blocks away.

Dogwoods in and around Atlanta

There are many native dogwood trees (Cornus florida is the Latin name for this native tree) flowering in and around Atlanta. Actually the lovely dogwood blossoms herald spring in Georgia . It is such a pleasure to drive along the roads where so many varieties of dogwoods can be seen, bearing clouds of white or various shades of pink blossoms. Here is a southern mansion with a dogwood tree, on the left behind the azalea bushes, starting to bloom




A dogwood tree, in full bloom, is a lovely sight. This year the dogwood trees look especially nice, with gorgeous colors..

These dogwood trees seem to be covered with snowflakes -

Such delicate and fragile blossoms - (click on any picture to enlarge it)













The dogwood trees are loved both by humans for their elegance and beauty and by wild birds for their seeds in the fall. Unfortunately, a couple of weeks ago, two of our wild dogwood trees went down during the last storm which had up to 60 miles an hour wind.

Swarm of bees in the azalea bush

Many years ago I was given a small pot with a pink azalea in it. We planted it in the back yard and never fertilized it nor pruned it. Now it is about 12 feet high and each spring is covered with radiant blossoms like a resplendent giant pink cloud.






A few days ago, my husband, Jim, was reading on the porch and heard an unusual sound which came from the azalea bush. He called me to come outside and we observed what we guessed to be hundreds of honey bees swirling around the bush and then settling inside the foliage of the bush itself.

After finding the Beekeeper Association in the phone book, I contacted Bee’s Honeybee Removal and Cindy Bee herself (that is her real name) came with all her accoutrement to gently remove our honeybees and give them a good home where they will provide some good honey with all her other 1000's of honeybees.

She gave us a quick course in honeybee (apis mellifera) habits. Honeybees are very social and create elaborate hives where they work together in 3 groups called castes: queens, drones and workers. Each hive has one queen honeybee laying about 1500 eggs a day for up to 8 years. The worker honeybees called “field bees” gather pollen, nectar, water and a sticky plant resin used in the building of the hive. When the hive is overflowing with nectar, pollen and baby bees, the worker bees “panic”. They feed royal jelly to the fresh eggs in order to create a new queen honeybee and starve the old queen honeybee, which subsequently leaves the hive, accompanied by a large number of her loyal followers. She lands nearby and all the honeybees flying with her come and form a living “bee” ball around her – which is what we saw in our azalea bush. Cindy Bee efficiently led the honeybees into the frames of her nuc box and very few remained. When asked, Cindy said that this swarm had about 30,000 honeybees or more. Our guess of “hundreds” was pretty far off the mark.

We have another azalea bush, white, which flowered a few days later, but no great numbers of honeybees came this time. We’d like to plant a couple more azalea bushes but there are so many varieties – thousands of them – that it will be hard to make a choice.