This gallery features a 4-season photo journal of the magical Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford done with the CT Flickr Meetup. With each season; sunset or sunrise; light shower, pelting rain or snowstorm; to trees that bloom or leaves that fall from one of its majestic trees and are blown across the hill, this cemetery and each of its monuments takes on a whole new look. During the past year I had the pleasure of spending many hours capturing unique and fleeting seasonal moments here; and I have been changed forever. If a place can be a friend, Cedar Hill has indeed become one to be cherished.

Cedar Hill is a beautiful forerunner of an American "rural" cemetery dating from 1864. It has 270 acres of rolling hills, ponds, wetlands, fields, and wildlife and has 300,000 permanent residents from the Hartford area and beyond: Katharine Hepburn; Samuel Colt and his wife, Elizabeth; J. P. Morgan; Yung Wing, America's (and Yale's) first Chinese graduate; Horace Wells, the discoverer of anethesia; Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of the First American School for the Deaf; poets, authors, TV stars, an aviation pioneer; a professional boxer, women's rights activists; Mark Twain's physician & friends; a civil war general; and a naval officer under Abraham Lincoln, and many more illustrious and accomplished people...as well as many others who might not have been famous, but who were very special to the people they loved.

This cemetery has many personalities and is quite "alive" not only by virtue of its wonderful trees, flowers, birds and wildlife, but because its beauty and its residents' passions for life touch and live on in all those who visit.