THE ECOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF GRIEF
Multispecies Liminalities in Mt. Hope Cemetery
JACOB MILLER
Cemeteries may be designated for the death of one species, but they can (and often do) provide life for a multitude of others. In Rochester, New York, Mt. Hope Cemetery, a 169-acre property home to over 350,000 humans at rest, is one such place. Among its numerous graves are countless bird nests, groundhog burrows, and other animal residences. The liminality of the cemetery, its existence on this threshold between human and nonhuman animals, can be seen in the multiple interspecies interactions that take form throughout, and it is in these interactions that the social groups active in this site—grave plot owners, the Friends of Mt. Hope and volunteers, the City of Rochester, nonhuman animals, and the buried—occupy various, and often conflicting, societal roles and put forth competing ideas about the very nature of a cemetery.1,2
Given this variety, it’s not possible to reduce the cemetery to one singular function. The function of the cemetery varies depending on the actor, their interaction with other actors, and their use of the space. Scholars such as Franklin Ginn, Colin Jerolmack, and Emma Power have explored how nonhuman animals defy the very spaces and boundaries imagined by humans.3,4,5 And while their work provides great insight into how such acts of defiance threaten the beliefs we attribute to these spaces, they are wrong to reduce this to a human-versus-nonhuman conflict—that is, one that is universal in its identity-construction of a given species. Rather, these violations of what Jerolmack terms “imaginative geographies” vary depending on the human imagining the space in the first place. They are, thus, born out of conflicts between humans of differing social groups, as I observed during my interviews with three people affiliated with Mt. Hope Cemetery.
In late March, I went on a tour of the cemetery led by the Friends of Mt. Hope (FOMH), a 501(c)(3) non-profit dedicated to preserving and restoring the cemetery and its residents. It was on this tour that I met an older couple who owned a plot with a few graves of their relatives. The husband, Ray, mentioned an issue they were having with woodchucks digging around their plot. He recalled a particular instance where the woodchucks “stole clothing from the graves.”6 He showed me a picture where a hole was dug directly in front of the stone, a scrap of fabric laying just on the perimeter. When I asked him what he did to solve this issue, Ray explained how “some people use dry ice to deplete the holes of oxygen […] but I don’t do anything to get rid of them; I just call the city and ask them to take care of it.”
The woodchucks defy Ray’s, as well as other grave plot owners’, designations of the cemetery as a space for remembrance and grief. The leader of the tour even warned all of us to “be careful of holes in the ground from the woodchucks.” Ray pointed me to four holes in total while on the tour: two he just happened to find during the tour and the other two at his own plot. All of them were within a foot of a gravestone. The groundhogs’ defiance of the space, it seemed, poses not only a symbolic threat to human grievers, but a physical one too.
FIGURE ONE
A woodchuck hole next to one of Ray’s stones, upon which a clothing scrap lies on the perimeter
(Jacob Miller, 2025)
FIGURE TWO
Two woodchuck holes Ray pointed me to during the tour
(Jacob Miller, 2025)
While certain species seem to defy the aesthetic norms assigned by humans to graveyards, others reify them. A retired professor at the University of Rochester, Nina has been heavily involved in a project dedicated to building bluebird houses in Mt. Hope Cemetery since the project’s inception in 2006. Her first memories of the cemetery are of jogging with other university faculty down the cemetery roads and noticing many run-down, decrepit bluebird houses––the remains of a neglected Boy Scout project, she explained to me. After asking around about these houses, she was invited by the Friends of Mt. Hope to refurbish them via their funding and support. Since then, the project has grown considerably in scale and has remained consistently active.
The two most common occupants are bluebirds and house wrens, who seem to be in a perpetual occupancy-war with each other. Chickadees also settle into some of these houses, though the bluebirds and house wrens will often destroy their nests and kill their young, Nina explains. As a result, the prevailing resident has consistently fluctuated between bluebirds and house wrens over the years. Other tolerated residents include a flying squirrel, who has occupied the same house for the last four years.
Nina, however, notes numerous instances where other animals have “vandalized” these houses. Downy woodpeckers seem to be the main culprits of the vandalism, though their damage is not significant enough to necessitate any countermeasures. There are also other residents that are not tolerated as well, namely wasps and house sparrows. The presence of these residents necessitates “spraying the wasp nests and throwing out sparrow nests.” In other words, the house sparrows and wasps defy Nina’s designation of the houses for native bird species.
But Nina also seems to not tolerate some of the other human attitudes towards the bluebird houses. She recalled numerous people who requested bluebird houses to be constructed over their gravestones, an idea that she finds “disturbing” and has consistently rejected. Although certain people seem to feel that the presence of bluebirds would reify the aesthetic of grief they designate to the cemetery, this act in itself violates the aesthetic that Nina originally designated to the bluebird houses. It would seem, then, that other humans defy Nina’s designation of the bluebird houses just as much as the house sparrows and wasps.
FIGURE THREE
Bluebird chicks in a bluebird house
(Jacob Miller, 2025)
From the seemingly infinite complications created by these different designations, Mt. Hope seems anarchical despite its calm and idyllic appearance. However, these many conflicting designations are ultimately mediated by the political organizations that maintain the space, as pointed out by Allie, a volunteer from the Friends of Mt. Hope. One day Allie and I met at the entrance on Elmwood Avenue, across from which Strong Memorial Hospital stood on the other side of the road. The incessant chaos of the hospital stood in a stark contrast to the undulating quietude of the cemetery. We walked around the cemetery as she told me about her experience as FOMH’s “only naturalist-at-large” and how she worked her way to this self-bestowed title.
Our conversation began with Strong, where she used to work. It was on her breaks that she would cross the street from the hospital into the cemetery where she would go on long walks. She explained this was something many of the hospital staff did to “clear their head” in between long and stressful shifts. She has now been a volunteer for FOMH for four years; she aspires to raise awareness on the cemetery’s role “as a natural resource.” This viewpoint can be traced back to the pleasure and relief she associates with the space from her very first interactions.
There were also numerous times throughout our conversation where Allie outlined the interactions between FOMH and the City of Rochester, the two largest human-groups active in the cemetery. Allie notes how the City of Rochester effectively “owns the cemetery”: the land, the roads, everything except the gravesites. However, they sell plots of land to be used as gravesites. “Their primary goal” is thus to “maintain the lands and roads…and sell gravesites.” The way the city government sees it, according to Allie, “most people wanna see a lawn that’s mowed.” But she explains the importance of leaves for the natural area: “I would love to see when the leaves fall, you leave them on the ground.” Much of the City of Rochester’s work then includes mowing the lawns, fixing signage and roads, and finding more land to convert to potential gravesites.
But the existing gravesites, or “stones,” are only looked after by those who bought them. In the case of older stones, Allie says to me, “no family may be alive to repair them. FOMH is responsible and has to pay out of pocket.” She explains the process where FOMH volunteers can “adopt” graves and repair them if damaged; she and other volunteers have adopted numerous cradle graves, the beds of which they have repurposed for gardening native plants. She notes that the plants they have grown in these cradle graves have unintentionally provided a food source for many woodchucks and deer in the cemetery. She said she did not mind, though she started growing plants that she knew they would not eat and seemed delighted to see them unharmed as we passed by.
According to Allie, FOMH leads all the tours, organizes cemetery-related events, adopts and repairs “forgotten” stones, and funds numerous volunteer projects, among other efforts. Despite all this, when I asked what authority FOMH has over the cemetery, Allie responded “zero.” All events and projects have to be approved by the cemetery manager, an employee of the City of Rochester. This dichotomy between the city government and FOMH is one of many found throughout the cemetery.
Certain dichotomies even exist within a singular person. Allie notes the many “compromises” that she has to make as a volunteer, such as with poison ivy. She recognizes that the plant is “native and gives berries to the birds, but birds spread it rampantly, and it’s perceived as a threat to the public.” Consequently, she lets it grow on trees but prevents it from spreading any further. The same goes for sassafras: Allie explains that “it’s native and good for the environment but needs to be removed because it damages infrastructure.” Perhaps the greatest compromise is with trees, so many of which are “aging out, how hundreds of years old” and as such start to lean, the threat of their collapse over the gravesites below growing more imminent with time. Given this predicament, volunteers like Allie have to report trees they deem are bound to fall and potentially damage stones that FOMH will ultimately be tasked with taking care of. “If this were wild, I’d let the trees fall,” she points out.
To a certain extent, Allie yearns for the cemetery to be free of the designations imposed by humans although she seems to be held back by both the designations of these two political organizations (whether she agrees with them or not) and her own designations of this space as one of aesthetic pleasure. On top of this, it is important to recognize that the FOMH and City of Rochester designate the space in similar ways, despite the differences outlined by Allie. Both are concerned with preserving the aesthetic of the cemetery and how that aesthetic elicits both grief and pleasure for human passerby. In that respect, the function of these two organizations is actually determined by the aesthetic desires of these human passersby, despite appearing to hold much greater authority over the space.
FIGURE FOUR
Poison ivy cut short by Nina
(Jacob Miller, 2025)
FIGURE FIVE
The tomb of Lewis Henry Morgan, where Nina pointed out a tree that needed to be cut down since it was getting older and leaning over the tomb
(Jacob Miller, 2025)
FIGURE SIX
One of Allie’s cradle graves, purposefully planted with flora that herbivores will not eat
(Jacob Miller, 2025)
These differing aesthetics that are attached to Mt. Hope Cemetery––and the imagined borders and rules created by them––collide, merge, and refract off one another, entangling the liminality of Mt. Hope as a space caught between the preservation of anthropocentric histories and the pursuit of more biocentric futures.
NOTES
1. City of Rochester. 2024. “Mount Hope Cemetery.” City of Rochester, New York. 2024. https://www.cityofrochester.gov/departments/department-environmental-services/mount-hope-cemetery.
2. The Friends of Mt. Hope Cemetery. 2021. “Friends of Mount Hope Cemetery – Rochester, NY.” Fomh.org. April 20, 2021. https://fomh.org/.
3. Ginn, Franklin. 2014. “Sticky Lives: Slugs, Detachment and More-Than-Human Ethics in the Garden.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (4): 532–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12043.
4. Jerolmack, Colin. 2008. “How Pigeons Became Rats: The Cultural-Spatial Logic of Problem Animals.” Social Problems 55 (1): 72–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2008.55.1.72.
5. Power, Emma R. 2009. “Border-Processes and Homemaking: Encounters with Possums in Suburban Australian Homes.” Cultural Geographies 16 (1): 29–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474008097979.
6. This name, as with others throughout this essay, are aliases to protect my interlocutors’ privacy.