Cedars & Cemeteries                                 

By Tom Poland 

So there I was on the phone driving through peach country near Johnson, South Carolina. Anonymous Mysterious Florida Woman (AMFW) and I were talking books and hurricane worries when I drove by a cemetery. “Just passed an old, beautiful cemetery,” I told her.

“Tom, why is it that cemeteries almost always have cedar trees around them,” she asked. It was a good question from this sharp Southern lady who doesn’t miss a thing. This cemetery had cedar trees around it and when I passed another cemetery and saw cedars around it, I got curious. I knew that it’s common to see cedar trees along a fence line. Easy to explain. Birds eat the seeds and perch on the fences. Nature takes its course and the seeds sprout where the birds drop them. But cedars around cemeteries? That question sent me on a journey.

The cedar, I learned, is known as the “graveyard tree.” Seems it’s a practice to plant cedars around graves. Over in the Ozarks superstition holds that when the cedar tree you plant around your grave grows tall enough to shade it, you’ll die. Maybe that’s because cedars take a long time to grow. You sure wouldn’t want to plant a southern yellow pine near your grave. You’d be a goner in no time.

I learned a lot about cedars, death, and graveyards. The Cherokee believed that cedars held the spirits of the departed. I learned that no other tree is mentioned in such high regard in the Bible as the cedar. So, cemeteries and cedars possess a religious connection. Also, the fact that the cedar is an evergreen renders it a symbol of everlasting life. Just don’t try to relocate one. Legend holds that if you transplant a cedar and it dies, you will, too, and soon.

Another reason, say some, that you find cedars in graveyards is that their shallow root systems let them do better there than other trees. Makes sense given all the digging that goes on in a cemetery.

Ebenezer Cemetery at Clio, SC Photo by Robert C. Clark 

You readers know that I’ve long railed against the corporate-run memorial gardens with their manicured lawns, small metal “stones,” and plastic flowers. In no way do these bland cemeteries offer the beauty and character of old graveyards with their ancient tombstones and trees.

Give me a real cemetery with old stones and trees. One good thing about belonging to small churches in the South is that many of us have family plots. We know where we will be buried. I mean the very spot where we’ll rest. I have stood on the exact spot where I will rest and thought mightily about life. I look around and see family members and friends who have gone to the Great Beyond. All have beautiful Georgia blue granite stones. Lord, thank you for not letting me be laid to rest in a place that looks like a campground where you hook up campers, RVs, and Honda generators.

A few years back, Mom had our family plot worked on. She had granite coping laid down around it and crushed gravel spread across it. Now I’d much prefer grass to crushed gravel. And the plot needs a tree in my view. In fact the entire cemetery at New Hope Baptist Church back home is treeless save for one tree down the hill a ways. I may talk to the church elders to see if it’s okay if I plant a tree near my grave.

And what tree might that be? Well, it won’t be an eastern red cedar, the beloved do-it-yourself Christmas tree of the South. No, I’d like to plant a crepe myrtle there, one with brilliant red blossoms, watermelon variety. A splash of red and green in summer sounds good to me. And maybe some of its seeds will find a home for my sisters and parents. An oasis of crepe myrtles with its elegant bare trunks and bursts of color would be a good thing, far better than a plaque sunk into the ground with plastic flowers above it, and I am dead certain of once thing. AMFW would agree.

Writer’s Note: You can spell crepe myrtle two ways, “crepe” or “crape.” The common name is crapemyrtle. However, down South we spell it “crepe” myrtle because the delicate blooms resemble crepe paper.

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
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Tom Poland is the author of twelve books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press released his book, Georgialina, A Southland As We Knew It, in November 2015 and his and Robert Clark’s Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II in 2014. The History Press of Charleston published Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia in 2014. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture and speaks often to groups across South Carolina and Georgia, “Georgialina.”