burial. Landscape Abney Park was unique in being the first arboretum to be combined with a cemetery in Europe; offering an educational attraction that was originally set in a landscape of fields and woods, some distance from the built-up boundary of London. Its 2,500 trees and shrubs were all labelled, and arranged around the perimeter alphabetically, from A for Acer (maple trees) to Z for Zanthoxylum (American toothache trees). The emphasis on an educational landscape, as opposed to one purely aesthetic, visually attractive picturesque, drew partly on a simplified version of John Loudon's 'Gardenesque' concept, and applied something akin to this, but with a unique alphabetical approach, and no structural mounding, to a picturesque cemetery design. It was much admired by Loudon, who described the Cemetery as "the most highly ornamented cemetery in the vicinity of London", albeit that he favoured a more formal and classical approach to garden cemetery design as a general rule and, in 1843 developed design principles for such an approach. At the Stoke Newington cemetery the botanical planting was carefully sited since the design sought to do as little as possible to change the existing picturesque parkland. This careful approach drew on that used at Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston where Dearborn had emphasised the compatibility of horticulture and even an experimental garden with a cemetery, leading to the opening of a cemetery supported by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society; one that succeeded in establishing a picturesque landscape coupled with botanical garden specimens and an adjoining scientific garden. There were important differences, however; the New England cemetery had benefited from a more sylvan setting than that of Abney Park, and a much larger estate. Nonetheless, the ties were evident. The founding directors of the Abney Park project were all Congregationalists, who together with other nonconformists had strong links with their brethren in the New World, to where they had emigrated in search of religious freedom. George Collison, Abney Park Cemetery's company secretary, and the key force behind its radical design, recorded his visit to, and impressions of, Mount Auburn Cemetery, in a book published to coincide with the opening of the Stoke Newington cemetery. It also contains a complete list of all the arboretum species and varieties planted at Abney Park. The concept of the arboretum—and indeed also a rosarium—was inspired by George Loddiges FLS FZS, a local Hackney nurseryman who became a small shareholder in