Take the number 4 train north until the rails run out at the last stop, step onto the street, and one of New York’s stranger pieces of magic is waiting nearby: four hundred acres of Woodlawn Cemetery. Woodlawn was established in 1863, while the Civil War was Still tearing at the country. Today it is a National Historic Landmark, a cemetery, an outdoor museum of funerary art, and a serious urban forest in the Bronx.
The trees are not decoration pasted onto the place after the fact. They are part of Woodlawn’s design and history. Early records
describe a landscape-lawn plan influenced by the work of Adolph Strauch, and Woodlawn’s own historical account says its financial records show orders for hundreds of dogwoods, beeches, magnolias and Japanese maples. A 2016 survey counted about 6,300 trees representing 142 species, helping Woodlawn qualify as a Level II arboretum.
Then there are the Japanese maples – more than 300 of them documented in the Real Still book. Their distinction is what was not done to them. Instead of being clipped into polite garden ornaments, many were allowed to grow with little pruning, spreading, Sagging, twisting and doubling back on themselves. Given decades, the little imported ornamentals became characters: red umbrellas, orange storms, crooked old dancers leaning over granite.
In autumn the cemetery changes register. Stone stays gray; the maples go to work. Scarlet, rust, copper and orange hang over