Graceland Cemetery: A Design History

Graceland Cemetery: A Design History by Christopher Vernon

Lacking the morbid gloom of many burial grounds, Graceland Cemetery is considered one of the best-known landscapes in the world. Its light-filled, prairie school-style design, which is laid out on a sandy ridge in northern Chicago in the USA, is the culmination of several decades of expansion.

This book places the cemetery’s landscape architecture in the context of Chicago’s growth as a commercial epicentre and gives readers an insight into how the site evolved to become “perhaps the most famous example of landscape gardening designed by a Western man,” according to horticulturist Wilhelm Miller. The cemetery was laid out by William Saunders and Swain Nelson in 1860 and then further developed by a number of high-profile landscape designers.

Recently, O. C. Simonds’s contributions have been a particular focus, reflecting a renewed interest in native plants and the ecological principles of planting design. The chapters are littered with images and author Christopher Vernon, Associate Professor in Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts at the University of Western Australia, does well in unravelling the history of this significant site.

Christopher Vernon, University of Massachusetts Press, Hardcover, 2012, 254 pages. rrp $39.95.