Tiny Petals, by Barbara Glover

Stoke Newington was not a place I wanted to stay one more night unless it was absolutely necessary.

However, there I found myself in the far northern reaches of the giant metropolis of greater London, winding up a business trip for a dead-end job, and my flight had been cancelled. It was a cloudy, overcast day, with a rainy drizzle falling, as I finished my morning coffee in the hotel’s small restaurant. I thought I might as well check out the local cemetery that the concierge had been raving about the night before. I had nothing else to do, and a long boring day stretched out before me. Maybe I could take a few interesting photos. They would be something to add to my unknown travel blog. Oh, how I wished my blog was not so unknown. 

Getting up from the table, I wandered out the door of the restaurant and down the main road to the impressive wrought iron gates of Abney Park Cemetery. There it stood before me, a genuine Victorian cemetery that had opened back in 1860 (Deol). I trudged in. I grabbed a pamphlet at the gate and turned on my phone to play the audio podcast walk “Woodland Magick” (Reagan) recommended by the concierge. Following the podcast’s instructions, I selected a wooded path that followed the perimeter of the grounds, and soon I was enclosed by walls of tall trees and overgrown bushes, thick as sheep’s wool. The rain dripped and drizzled over the plant leaves and, as I wandered further in it, drizzled over long forgotten gravestones. The stones arose in the undergrowth like small, rocky outcrops. Moss covered much of the white limestone and in places one could still make out the ancient faded writing. I do not really like graveyards, and the melancholy audio podcast I was listening to about angry river and tree spirits (Reagan) did not lift my mood. I turned the audio guided walk off and instead kept moving at a very fast clip.

The paths in the cemetery crisscrossed each other and soon I was lost, having taken a few too many turns. Deciding to check whether the pamphlet had a grounds map, I sat down gingerly on a park bench near what looked like a long-ago family plot. There was a very large grave marker and many tangled vines crawling all over the face of the stone. As I sat there, I listened to the silence of the place and realized for the first time that I was actually in a woodland, not just a cemetery. I watched squirrels chasing each other up a tree.  One squirrel would dart up a tree branch, then turn its head back and playfully glance backward in the direction of the other squirrel. Back and forth they went at their game of chase, all over the tree limbs entwined like a spider web. I heard the calls of birds, some loud, others screeching, and still others softly chirping. A robin alighted onto the grave marker.  Bird seed were scattered about like grains of sand, suggesting that someone had fed them recently.

A profusion of flowers was located at the foot of the large gravestone. At first glance I thought that perhaps someone had recently left them, but on closer examination, I saw that the flowers were growing out of the ground.  One tulip was starting to bloom. Its bud was opening to reveal the pistil and stamens that poked through the unfurling of tiny petals. Soon bees and other insects would alight on the opened flower, collect its pollen, and then transport this pollen to the stigma--female part--of another tulip. After the pollen germinated, a fertilized seed would be created (Barth 15). This lifecycle would be repeated for the different flowers present, from daffodils to roses, and strange, unfamiliar wildflowers. The flower carpet spread out far and wide in front of me. The grave site, a final resting place for someone, had over the years become something else. The shock of this kept me rooted to my seat. I decided to open my pamphlet.

Abney Park, the pamphlet said, was a Victorian garden cemetery. There were many famous people buried there. It was the final resting place of: playwrights, poets, and pantomime actors (Deol). This explained all the elaborate gravestones that graced the many winding paths throughout the cemetery (Deol). Common folks were also buried alongside the nineteenth century’s rich and notorious, and they were in fact in the majority (Deol). Most of the graves were no longer being maintained and the woods had grown up around, amid, and among the gravestones, creating an ethereal haunted wood.

What really caught my attention, though, was reading that the cemetery was now being maintained as a woodland. And having just wandered along many of its paths, I could see it. The cemetery was home to many bird and animal species, as well as a thriving collection of different plants (“Abney Park – Nature”). In addition, the cemetery offered events throughout the year ranging from weekly Sunday walks to Halloween concerts and nature tours (“Abney Park – What’s On”). They also had an entire program of children’s events to teach them about the nature that now called the cemetery home (“Abney Park – Forest School Holiday Club”). The cemetery had indeed transformed into the woodland I was now experiencing. From the ashes of the corpses interned beneath its soil, the cemetery had been reborn.

I sat alone, transfixed on that bench. I picked up a flower and began to pluck off each petal like I had

done in my childhood, to see what fate awaited me concerning my online advertising career. The birds chirped, the squirrels darted, and the rain softly splatted on the worn gravestone nearby. My mind wandered back to the last three days of the boring web marketing conference I had attended, that I had flown all the way across the ocean to attend. I was tired of the constant designs for online ads that did nothing to enhance a web user’s experience, but only to annoy them like a mosquito buzzing around one’s head on a hot summer’s day. I wanted to swat the ads more than I wanted to be involved any longer in their creation. Glancing at the large gravestone in front of me, I conjured up a mental image of it as the latest online ad I had recently created.  Suddenly, I saw online ads springing up everywhere in my mind, as gravestones in a cemetery. They were overgrown with vines of boredom, and crawling with anxiety. I wondered why no one was tending to their upkeep. However, if that person was supposed to be me, then I no longer wanted that task. I wanted to let the forest of online stories overgrow and claim them.  I wanted my online presence to be something else. I needed to create something new.

The shock of my thoughts caused me to jump up from the stone bench. The forest around me was still, except for the calling of a lone bird. I did not recognize the bird, but I knew what she said. Mother Nature was in agreement with me. I thought of my unknown blog.  It was time to go and make my blog known to the world.  I would start by photographing this cemetery. These photos would start the process of the rebirth of my online presence. I would build up my travel blog slowly, writing about and photographing different places and events. My blog would gain a following and advertisers would want to place their ads on my blog. Companies and nonprofits would pay me to write stories about them and their events. The process of rebirth would be slow at first, just as the woods had slowly overtaken the graves in Abney Park, but it would happen. In time, my online presence would show my former online ads as mere dusty outcrops, like the graves amid a thick forest of interesting blog articles. I would rebirth my online experience just as Abney Park Cemetery had been reborn as a woodland. From dark despair, would come transformation. My online life would renew like the unfurling of tiny petals.

Works Cited

“Abney Park – Forest School Holiday Club,” Abney Park Trust, www.abneypark.org/learning/young-people, Accessed 20 February 2018.

“Abney Park – Nature,” Abney Park Trust, www.abneypark.org/nature, Accessed 20 February 2018.

“Abney Park – What’s On,” Abney Park Trust, www.abneypark.org/what-s-on, Accessed 20 February 2018.

Barth, Friedrich G. Insects and Flowers: The Biology of a Partnership, Princeton University Press, 1985.

Deol, Daan. “7 Secrets of Abney Park Cemetery,” Londonist, https://londonist.com/london/secret/7-secrets-of-abney-park-cemetery, Accessed 17 February 2018.

Reagan, Romany. “Audio Walk: Abney Rambles – Woodland Magick,” Abney Rambles, https://abneyrambles.com/2016/06/19/audio-walk-abney-rambles-woodland-magick/, Accessed 17 February 2018.