refereed paper Wilderness and garden: Vegetation change in a cemetery landscape

This paper traces the story of vegetation change in a Victorian cemetery in Christchurch, New Zealand. Its pattern of physical and attitudinal change over time is at once specifi c to this particular landscape and also echoed in many such burial landscapes across recently colonised settlements. The establishment of the cemetery fi rst required the removal of the indigenous vegetation—the taming of the wilderness. Once the cemetery had been closed for burial this ‘new ’ vegetation was left untended to fend for itself, and much of it grew out of control. The cemetery itself became a wilderness again, in European eyes. Eventually human control was again reasserted in the cemetery and the destructive potential of this imported nature was countered with its co-option in the evocation of different strands of idealised memory. Different aspects of Time itself are constantly referenced through this particular kind of landscape, from the geological, such as the deep time of Gondwana vegetation, to the mythical, such as the unreachable Edenic past, and the time beyond time when all will meet again in Paradise. Given the complex layers of historical and cultural meaning given to vegetation in the cemetery setting, this narrative explores some of the many infl uences and readings of Time within landscape change. referee