POORER IN BUDGET, RICHER IN BEAUTY

CATHOLIC CEMETERY 

CITY CEMETERY

Saturday,  8:30 AM.  54 degrees F at the ferry dock, 59 on the back porch.  The wind is SSW, calm with occasional light to moderate gusts (therefore the warmer temperature up here on the bluff).  The sky is clear, the humidity 72% and the barometer more-or-less steady at 30.32".  It is a fine spring day, with the first fluffy seeds of the poplar trees floating about.
   Bayfield has two cemeteries, across Washington Ave. from each other, up the steep bluff just to the west of town.  The Catholic Cemetery is on the north side of the road, the public City of Bayfield Cemetery on the south side.  Both are old, going back to the beginning of the community a century-and- a-half ago. Both are the same size, with pretty much the same soil, water and other environmental conditions.
    By all appearances and accounts they are similar, except that the Catholic Cemetery has a quite beautiful and growing presence of creeping phlox, Phlox subulatta. a creeping perennial native to dunes, shores and rock outcroppings in the northeastern US (but not to our area).  It is a much-used perennial, and has evidently escaped and become established. The City Cemetery has none.
    I have pondered this horticultural mystery, and there can be only a few reasons for the discrepancy (and relative difference in natural beauty).
     It might be that the Catholics have been better and more prolific perennial gardeners, planting more creeping phlox on their graves, which have escaped into the surrounding grass lawn areas, but I see no evidence of such difference,  or between the gardens of Catholics and other gardens around Bayfield,  at least as can be inferred from the original Catholic and protestant neighborhoods.
     The most  logical reason for the difference in populations of creeping phlox between the two virtually identical cemeteries (one with many phlox, the other with virtually none) would be degrees of lawn maintenance.  Creeping phlox will grow and spread in very poor soil conditions; low fertility, low moisture, sandy soil.  I will theorize that the City Cemetery has enjoyed a better budget over the years than the Catholic Cemetery, which has favored the phlox population through lack of lawn fertilizer and probably more importantly, herbicides.
    On the other hand, creeping phlox will establish and increase itself in lawn grasses that are kept mown short.  Could it be that the Catholic Cemetery is traditionally mown more frequently than the City Cemetery?  I doubt it.
    I suppose I could delve deeper into this mystery, but am reluctant to get involved in a religious dispute; could it be that the devout Catholics pray for the creeping phlox and the more secular City Cemetery folks do not?  I sure don't wish to go there!
   Besides, I have come to the conclusion from hard experience that it is best to let sleeping cemeteries, like sleeping dogs, lie in peace.  Case in point: back in my days of working on a MS thesis on prairie restoration, I came across an old settler's cemetery in southern Wisconsin that had not been mowed for years and had unintentionally become a refuge for increasingly rare prairie plants (back then prairie plants were found almost exclusively in abandoned cemeteries and along railroad rights-of way;  2,4-D has taken care of that, of course).
    Elated, I began to publicize my find, a local newspaper published the fact that the old cemetery had not been mowed in years, and a local Boy Scout troupe took over the mowing responsibility.  The cemetery soon became neat and maintained, and the prairie plants disappeared in the bluegrass, hopefully to lay dormant under the sod along with the old settlers until the do-gooders got tired of doing good.  I have never gone back to try to find the cemetery or the prairie plants.  They are probably under some six-lane freeway.
    Regardless of the reason for the difference between the creeping phlox populations in the two locations, it is obvious to me that the Catholic Cemetery, perhaps poorer in budget, is far richer in beauty.