Planting of new trees at Evergreen Cemetery celebrate its new status as an arboretum
Published 9:30 pm Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Sunshine made the planting of four new trees at Evergreen Cemetery an enthusiastic event at noon Monday, May 19, as students and community supporters gathered to celebrate Arbor Day in Juneau’s newly established arboretum.
Harborview Elementary School teacher Carol Bookless led her fifth- and sixth-grade students across Glacier Avenue into the spring green of Juneau’s municipal cemetery to prepare the ground for planting a mountain hemlock to enhance the tranquil grassy lawns. Guided by Juneau Parks and Recreation Department’s arborist and landscape supervisor Ben Patterson the youngsters shoveled soil away to make the perfect depression to receive the sturdy young tree.
Bookless noted that as a child she had participated in a tree planting in her home state in the Lower 48 and recalled the long-lasting impact that event had on her. It was an impetus for her to bring her students to engage in the same rewarding task.
“I brought the students so 20 years from now they can see what grew,” Bookless added. Her students wanted to come to the cemetery. Previously they had located the gravesite of Alaska Native Elizabeth Peratrovich and had laid wildflowers to honor Juneau’s famous civil rights leader.
A younger cohort of Harborview students helped plant three cedar trees in another area. Jessica Curry’s fourth graders shoveled and watered the young cedars during a classroom break.
Juneau Assembly member Christine Woll, standing in for Mayor Beth Weldon, read a proclamation honoring the cemetery and its new status as an arboretum.
Molly Hodges, chair of the Juneau Garden Club’s Arbor Day Committee, spoke of the updated digital map showing where more than 100 donated trees can be located using a QR code. Since 2000, the garden club and the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership have collaborated with the city to plant 42 varieties of trees in the cemetery.
They were also responsible for the successful nomination and confirmation of Evergreen Cemetery as an official level-one arboretum, said Patterson, who guided the planting operation. The designation was announced in October 2024. Several members of the partnership, garden club and professional foresters watched and assisted the students and city staff plant the trees. The cemetery joins the city-owned Jensen-Olson Arboretum, located at 23 Mile Glacier Highway, as an accredited arboretum.
Evergreen Cemetery tells the town’s history in headstones. First created in 1891 to relocate graves from downtown’s Chicken Ridge neighborhood (approximately Seventh Street) so mining claims could be activated, the graves are now locatable in a city database and mapping project. A three-page brochure with history and searchable detailed map can be found online via the city website or a search engine inquiry. Calhoun Avenue was first created to access the new cemetery in the 1890s.
Along with community leaders, Alaska Natives and others in designated sections of the cemetery, several victims of the tragic 1918 Princess Sophia shipwreck are buried together in Evergreen Cemetery. That plot includes Walter Harper, an Alaska Native man who was the first person to summit Denali in 1913 with Archdeacon Hudson Stuck’s climbing party.
• Laurie Craig is a local history researcher and former U.S. Forest Service park ranger who is a regular contributor to the Juneau Empire.
