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News & Events, May 2011
Dear Friend,
The Friends of Mount Auburn is pleased to present the May 2011 edition of our electronic
newsletter. We invite you to join our email list to receive this mailing on a monthly basis. To
address book today.
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 Friends of Mount Auburn May Programs
Join us in May for one of our Friends walks or lectures:
- Charles Sumner from Cradle to Grave - multi-site walking tour on Saturday, May 14th, 2:30 PM. This tour concludes a day-long series of tours following the life of Charles Sumner from his birth on Beacon Hill through his death in 1874. In addition to the afternoon tour at the Cemetery, consider joining one of the tours earlier in the day. To attend either of these programs, you must RSVP to each site separately:
10 AM - Abiel Smith School, Beacon Hill, call 617 - 742 - 5415
1 PM - Longfellow National Historic Site, call 617 - 876 - 4491
Register for programs online today!
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 Birds & Birding at Mount Auburn
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak
By Robert H. Stymeist
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak is one of the spring migrants that elicit excited "oh-ahs" from those seeing their very first grosbeak and even those who see them year after year, the males of this species is one of the sharpest looking of North American migrants.
The Rose-breasted Grosbeak is a bit smaller than a robin and has a very robin-like song but that's where the similarities stop. The males and females are completely different except for their large conical bill; the male has a black head and back, black and white wings and a bright red breast patch. The female is mostly brown, has a buffy belly, pale crown, and a wide eye stripe.
You can find the grosbeak anywhere at Mount Auburn; it can be found in a wide variety of habitats including coming to your backyard feeders. It is for the most part just a visitor to Mount Auburn from the last days of April through the third week of May, though it is occasionally seen during the summer and was suspected of nesting several years ago. On its nesting area the grosbeak prefers an area with large trees close together where it forages in the canopy gleaning insects. The grosbeaks also eat seeds, buds, and fruits. Unlike its close relative's the Cardinal and Evening Grosbeak, which tolerate our winters, the Rose-breast winters to Mexico and northern South America.
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 May is National Preservation Month!
Since the National Trust for Historic Preservation created Preservation Week in 1971 to spotlight grassroots preservation efforts in America, it has grown into an annual celebration observed by small towns and big cities alike.
Due to its overwhelming popularity, in 2005, the National Trust extended the celebration to the entire month of May and declared it Preservation Month to provide an even longer opportunity to celebrate the diverse and unique heritage of our country's historic sites and enable more Americans to become involved in the growing preservation movement.
Here at Mount Auburn, Preservation Month 2011 will be observed by a series of programs at the Cemetery:
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 Family Programming at Mount Auburn
Mount Auburn is a wonderful place to learn and explore for visitors of all ages. We invite children and their parents, grandparents, or any other favorite adults to join us for these special programs geared for families:
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May Concert: Virtuosity at Mount Auburn
Join us on Saturday, May 7th at 6PM for this special concert event featuring New England Conservatory graduates Raymond Lam, clarinet, and Amie Chen, piano, with special guest Jennifer Tietze, clarinet.
We will explore the vivacious contributions of clarinetist/composer Carl Baermann, whose son is buried at Mount Auburn, and other giants of the clarinet, like Benny Goodman, to the rich tradition of virtuosic instrumental music. $10 members; $15 non-members.
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 Horticultural Highlight
A lady like landscapes,
wearing time like an amusing shawl
thrown over her shoulders
by a friend at the bazaar:
Every once in a while she turns in it
just like a little girl,
this way and then that:...
- James Baldwin
Later this month you may marvel at the beloved, shawl-like flowers of the Dove tree, Davidia involucrata. These flowers' numerous reproductive stamens and pistils are arranged in tight, quarter-sized, red-colored, clusters.
Each flower head is wrapped from their base with a pair of white, delicate, unequal bracts. One bract, two-to-three inches-long , drapes over the small flower cluster, and a second, larger bract, seven-inches-long by four- inches-wide, hangs straight down. This showy floral display lasts for two weeks, and on a breezy day, the bracts can undulate like the whirl of a flamenco skirt.
Native to central China, this is a tree wrapped with scientific collecting legacies. The genus Davidia is named for Father Armand David (1826-1900), a French, Lazarist missionary. David, in China from 1862-1873, was an enthusiastic naturalist who first described for western science hundreds of animals, birds, plants, and insects. In addition to first documenting the Dove tree, among many other plants, he was the first westerner to describe the giant panda.
Another notable associated with the history of this tree is Augustine Henry (1857-1930), employed in China as a British Customs medical officer. Henry collected, prepared, and sent hundreds of dried plants, as herbarium sheets, including the Dove tree, to the Royal Botanic Garden in Kew. Many have heard of the face that launched a thousand ships, well it was one of Henry's herbarium sheets of the Dove tree that launched the career of a thousand plants. That was when Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930), a young English plantsman of twenty-three, in 1899 , was hired to bring back to England seeds of the Dove tree, for the prestigious Royal Exotic Nursery, of James Veitch & Sons, in Chelsea. Wilson accomplished this, and more, on his first, three-year-long, plant expedition to remote regions of China.
Wilson's later, greater accomplishments of introducing over 1000 new Asian plant types to western horticulture during succeeding expeditions have been widely recounted. This tree which may grow 30 to 40 feet tall, has broad-ovate, simple, leaves, three-to-five inches-long. It often exhibits an alternate year pattern of heavy flowering.
On your next visit to Mount Auburn, look for our Dove tree, Davidia involucrata on Lawn Avenue.
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For those who appreciate the early morning or who are looking for a quick walk before work, join us for Early Riser's Horticulture Club - brief excursions to highlight what's in bloom this spring! Fridays: May 6, May 20 and June 3 at 7AM. Free.
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Service of Commemoration
Saturday, May 28, 1:30 PM
Mount Auburn cordially invites you to remember the lives of friends and loved ones at our annual Service of Commemoration.
We set aside this time to celebrate the lives of those who have gone before us and to experience the uniqueness of Mount Auburn as a memorial of living beauty and peace.
This year's ceremony, to be held outdoors on the lawn in front of Bigelow Chapel, will feature remarks by Rev. Jean Marchant and Sister Marie LaBollita. Music will be provided by the Brass Consortium. Refreshments will be served following the service. In the case of rain, the service will be held indoors. Free. There is no preregistration for this event.
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 May History Highlight: Birding at Mount Auburn
Mount Auburn has long been a favorite destination for naturalists including prominent ornithologists, William Brewster (1851-1919) and Ludlow Griscom (1890-1959). Although some birds can be seen year round at Mount Auburn, hundreds of birdwatchers descend on the Cemetery in May to witness the migration of flycatchers, thrushes, vireos, tanagers, orioles, and warblers.
Mount Auburn's attraction as a stopover for birds migrating north was best described by Ludlow Griscom, "It appears, as a green oasis in a vast desert..." (The desert of course being the largely industrial and urban area of Boston and Cambridge).
As far back as 1870, Mount Auburn's trustees sought to encourage and protect birds within the Cemetery by introducing trees and shrubs that attract birds. Later, in the 1950s, our records again show that special planting programs were put in place to provide food and shelter for birds.
Mount Auburn President Oakes Ames commented, "To the bird lover no area in the general vicinity of Boston holds greater attraction, particularly during the migration of the warblers in May."
That statement holds true to this day, and as recently as 2002 Mount Auburn's prominence as a sanctuary for birds was (re)affirmed by its designation as an Important Bird Area of Massachusetts. Cemetery staff continues to carefully consider wildlife habitat when making decisions on our plant collections.
Since 1986 The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery has sponsored bird walks and compiled field observations posted by birders on the "Bird Sightings" chalk board at Entrance Gate of the Cemetery.
*sketch above by Clare Walker Leslie from Birds and Birding at Mount Auburn - an introductory guide to birding at the Cemetery.
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 Person of the Month: Edwin H. Land
This month we remember the life of Inventor and Photography Pioneer, Edwin H. Land(5/7/1909 - 3/1/1991).
Fascinated with kaleidoscopes and stereopticons at a young age, Edwin Land went on to experiment with reflection and simple polarizers for microscopes, eventually creating a plastic material to be coated on sheets of film. The film held micro-crystals which, by way of electric or magnetic fields or later by stretching, acted as a polarizer.
Because of its applications for reducing headlight glare and in viewing 3-D movies, Land's invention received the attention of General Motors, General Electric and Eastman Kodak. Kodak began buying the polarizer sheet for camera filters in 1934. The next year American Optical bought polarizer-laminated sunglass lenses. Such success caused Land to reorganize his venture as Polaroid Corporation in 1937, with financial backing from Wall Street leaders.
In 1943 he hit upon something new in the photographic industry. One afternoon he took a picture of his 3-year-old daughter Jennifer, who asked why she couldn't see the picture right away. So Land asked himself "Why not?" He later recalled that after an hour of concentration he had worked out the basics about the camera, film, and physical chemistry necessary to make the idea work. Land used the principle of diffusion transfer to reproduce the image recorded by the camera's lens directly onto a photosensitive surface that performed the dual role of film and photo. By November 26, 1948 the first instant cameras and film were in the stores, producing sepia pictures in 60 seconds. By 1950 the pictures came out in black and white. Then an instant color camera was introduced in 1963, "changing the picture-taking habits of millions of people." (New York Times Obituary, 3/2/1991)
Throughout his life, Land advocated the development of many small scientific industries. He felt small research laboratories would encourage a close relationship between scientists and those making their products and thus promote new fields of inquiry.
At the time of his death, Land held 533 patents, second only to Thomas Edison, and was elected to the Inventors Hall of Fame. His philanthropy led to Harvard's Science Center and MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, where he was a visiting professor.
*Photo of Edwin H. Land's monument, #10123 Aronia Path at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
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Thank you!
A special thank you to everyone who contributed to our special Tree Appeal, which has helped us offset unexpected costs for tree damage incurred as a result of this past winter's storms.
As of April 27th, we have received $8,700 in contributions for this worthy and immediate cause.
Your generous donations not only aided in clean-up efforts, but will be used towards the replanting of new trees this spring. We are extremely grateful for your continued support of Mount Auburn.
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Beyond Our Gates: Programs of Interest in the Community
- Going Native: 50 Favorite Plants for Local Gardeners - Wednesday, May 4th at 7PM. Learn about the importance of "going native" with expert botanist William Cullina, Director of Horticulture at Coastal Maine Botanic Gardens, who has spent a lifetime studying plants in their indigenous habitats. Cambridge Public Library, 449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
- Longfellow: The Poet and His Songs - Wednesday, May 11th at 7:30PM.
The young Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (portrayed by Rob Velella) explains his woes as a harried professor and up-and-coming poet. Watertown Public Library, 123 Main Street, Watertown, MA
- 201st Birthday Celebration for Margaret Fuller: An Inspiration to Generations of Women - Wednesday, May 25th at 6PM. To bring Fuller's bicentennial year to a close, the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee will be enjoying one last celebration of her legacy with a dinner in honor of her 201st birthday. Peabody Book Room, 12 West Street, Boston, MA
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Think green. Do not print this email and you will help to conserve valuable
resources. Thank you!
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You can now join or renew your membership in the Friends of Mount Auburn
quickly, securely and easily online!
The Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery was established in 1986 as a non-profit educational
Mount Auburn Cemetery is still a unique choice for burial and commemoration. It offers
a wide variety of innovative interment and memorialization options for all. Learn about
Mount Auburn's many burial and memorialization options. |
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Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery
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email: friends@mountauburn.org
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