Garden Club to present ‘Thyme to Walk through Garden of the Graves’

The Belleville Area Garden Club will host Rochelle Balkan presenting “Thyme to Walk through the Garden of the Graves” at 7:15 p.m., Monday, Oct. 20, at the Belleville Area District Library, 167 Fourth St. Snacks and beverages will be available at 6 p.m., followed by the club’s monthly meeting and the presentation will start at 7:15 p.m. Guests are invited to attend.
Balkan will take participants through her travels to cemetery gardens throughout Europe and the United States. As church cemeteries overflowed, landscape architects came to the rescue. Renowned names such as Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing turned their talents to the Victorian focus on death and dying by designing the first city greenscapes or “gardens of graves.” Pere Lachaise in Paris provided the inspiration for the rural tradition. Mt. Auburn, an organic design, and its successors were innovations in the U.S.
The rural tradition cemetery is the landscape architect’s vision of the relationship between man and nature with curving paths, water features, trees, shrubs, and flowers.