Abney Park Cemetery - 'Sweet Auburn' & Woodland Wildlife

'Sweet Auburn' & Woodland Wildlife

As may have been implied already, Abney Park Cemetery was the only garden cemetery of its era to be influenced by New World cemetery design ideas due to the strong links between its founders and New England; in particular Boston. The Stoke Newington cemetery reflects the design style adopted for Mount Auburn, for example in its use of an Egyptian Revival entrance and arboretum. However, though its 'model' lay in the New World, it drew on different romantic landscape associations. Whereas Mount Auburn Cemetery celebrated the 'Sweet Auburn' of poetry, in particular the nature and woodland associated with the Auburn village area, it was the 'romance' of religious and historical associations that primarily attracted the founders of London's first nondenominational garden cemetery, to Lady Mary Abney's estate which had served as an inspiration to the celebrated Isaac Watts. Nonetheless, on its opening, Abney Park was by far the most sylvan of all garden cemeteries in Britain; its many stately trees imbued the landscape with a uniquely well-timbered inheritance or 'green cloak', and plans were put in train to encourage this further with collections of trees arranged along, and set back from, path edges. Whereas the cemetery at Mount Auburn had been blessed with a natural woodland setting, well suited to its founders' ethos of creating an Elysian paradise, Abney Park would take some time to more closely reflect its predominantly woodland style of cemetery design and a more transcendental view of nature as proposed by Emerson, and Thoreau in New England.

Slowly, however, time has healed this difference and the landscape at Abney Park has grown closer to its New World cousin. Mature trees and woodland now adorn Abney Park, completing its transformation into a woodland cemetery. This has been so profound a change that by the early 1990s the cemetery was acknowledged to be the largest woodland ecosystem in North London so close to the centre of the City of London, and became designated as the first statutory Local Nature Reserve in the London Borough of Hackney.

Under careful management the woodland is slowly becoming enriched through natural regeneration. The northern areas are slowly returning to native oaks with a hornbeam and hawthorn understory, and a woodland ground flora that includes Wood False Brome grass and Wood Spurge; the whole being interspersed with naturalising exotic thorns and service trees to add a cross-cultural dimension. Meanwhile, the sandy brickearth soils that extend from Church Street along Dr Watts' Walk to the chapel lawns, the sole surviving heathland in Hackney, are returning to a lighter structure based on Silver Birch woodland and healthy species such as bracken fern. Today, a range of woodland birds, mammals and butterflies are supported; the grounds forming one of north London's largest breeding sites so close to the City for some very attractive species such as the Speckled Wood butterfly.

Nature changes gradually however, and the ecology will need active habitat management if these semi-natural sylvan qualities are to be preserved and enhanced, and to ensure that the naturalising exotic arboretum trees (such as Various-leaved Hawthorn and Service Tree of Fontainebleau) and plans for the replacement of Loddiges' perimeter A to Z arboretum, contribute their valuable educational and botanical interest to parts of the grounds.