Old City Cemetery

I was in Sacramento this weekend with Carri from Read Between the Limes. We visited the Old City Cemetery. Do you remember our last visit 3 years ago? I have longed to return.

To recap: 25,000 people (including many notable, early Californians) have their final resting place in these 44 acres. In the 1980s, concerned citizens organized to save the cemetery from neglect. Today, volunteers adopt cemetery plots as plant them as garden beds.

From the website:

The Cemetery has been refurbished with plants, flowers, and bushes and now also includes three major dedicated garden areas - Historic Gold Rush era roses (Historic Rose Garden, Bruner and Cadwalder areas); Perennial Plants (Hamilton Square Garden); and Native Plants (Native Plant Demonstration Garden).

The mission of the Old City Cemetery Committee is:

To join hands with the community to restore, beautify, preserve and protect the Historic City Cemetery, while maintaining access by descendants of the deceased, and to provide educational services to all visitors to the Historic City Cemetery of Sacramento.

This Rosa Banksiae 'Lutea' at its annual peak, climbing yews, stopped us in our tracks.















Rosa Banksiae was far from the only showstopper.



We were a couple weeks late for the peak of blue-flowered Ceanothus. Instead we enjoyed the much rarer sight of some rather enormous Fremontodendron californicum in full spring glory.







Rarer still were these large specimens of endangered Berberis nevinii, planted in a dramatic sequence.

"His life was gentle; and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,
And say to all the world, this was a man."

(Shakespeare)