Flowering Quince, Japonica
Latin: Chaenomeles speciosa

Behind The MAC, on Oak Grove Avenue and Hall, is Greenwood Cemetery. Last weekend, under a crispy cold sun (just like today, disregarding the 80 degree days in between), I went in past the gates for the first time to look. It's visually fabulous, wonderfully scruffy, texturally rich and quite fantastic. If you know Lee Friedlander's landscape work "Apples and Olives" or his earlier bramble bush works, you will know what I mean when I say it is the same dense visual texture as those works.  And if you are a fan of historical gardening, Greenwood is full of 1950's landscape flowers and plants, now out of fashion: Flowering 'japonica' Quince (what our friend Judy calls "sticks with blooms"), Iris and Nandina.

It was actually the flowering quince - very large, old bushes - blooming as they do in February, that finally drew me in past the fence.  The first bushes to flower here in Dallas are always the Quince: bright red to pink blooms on an otherwise woody bush.

I didn't spend much time this trip looking at headstones.  That is for a later visit.  But being a very old cemetery, some of the monuments are quite old and wonderfully weathered.

The sign at the entrance says "Sacred Grounds - No Jogging". But sightseeing seems not to be forbidden. It's an interesting place to visit.

Lee Friedlander, from "Apples and Olives"

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