Next to field of sunflowers is Dorothea Dix Hospital Cemetery

It struck me poignantly Wednesday when I came upon the cemetery where there rest several hundred or more patients of the former Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh. What hit me so hard?

The hospital was North Carolina’s first psychiatric hospital, opening in 1856. It closed in 2012.

Of  those hundreds of graves in the cemetery, there are less than two dozen that have anything more than a 12” by 6” concrete horizontal slab marking their resting place. The slab contains the deceased’s name (sometimes merely initials for a first name) and date of death. 

I suspected that the vast majority of those in the cemetery had no family to claim their remains or simply had no financial estate to afford the cost of a traditional burial. 

And when I hunted around on the Internet after I got home, I learned that indeed appears to be the explanation. 

Patients buried in the cemetery died in the period of 1859 to 1970.

Interestingly, the cemetery overlooks the park’s much more celebrated sunflower field to the east. The first photo below shows one of the headstones with the sunflower field visible through an opening between two trees. The headstone is that of Ida Phillips, which you’ll see in a much closer view in the second photo below. Ida’s headstone is one of the few in the cemetery that is upright.

In the first photo below, note that there are two plain slab markers near Ida’s headstone. The deceased in those graves have different last names than Phillips, so I don’t know if they are a relation to Ida, something I wondered considering how close they are to Ida’s grave.

Above: A number of crepe myrtle trees lines the pathway leading to the cemetery of the former Dix Hospital.

In the cemetery’s southeast corner, under a very shady tree, sits the wall of remembrance that you see in the photo leading off the post. The wall is adorned with objects that apparently visitors left behind in remembrance. I’ll have some closeup photos of some of the objects below. 

But first, here are pictures of all the other graves with upright headstones, followed by four examples of the much more prevailing common horizontal identification slabs. 

Above: Here’s a plain slab marker that somehow was uprooted and turned over. Perhaps by a person operating a lawn mower. 

A long-range view of the Wall of Remembrance (above) followed below by closeups of some of the things visitors left behind at, on or at the foot of the wall.  

At Raleigh’s Dorothea Dix Park, everything is coming up sunflowers

Just two months ago, I did several posts about a shoot I did at Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh. (The link in the previous sentence takes you to the first in a series of three posts from that visit.) One thing I was wanting to shoot at the time but couldn’t — because it was out of season -- was the park’s renowned sunflower field. The flowers wouldn’t be in bloom until July.

On Wednesday, I returned to the park and took care of that little detail, as this post attests. According to an article I saw last weekend in the Raleigh News & Observer, the sunflowers are expected to remain in bloom through this weekend. 

I was impressed by what I saw, and I made a point to try and get different perspectives and angles of the field itself and the blooms in various arrangements — singles, doubles, groups, lines, front and back. 

The park staff says sunflowers are growing on 5 acres of the field. To put that into perspective, 3.8 football fields — including the end zones — could fit onto 5 acres.

The area of field containing sunflowers — let’s call it the garden — can be strolled along a series of dirt paths, and visitors are asked to stay on those paths. When I was there, some of the most traveled paths also were topped with matting for protection from an overnight rainfall. (Yes, we finally got a decent rainfall!)

Sunflower plants average about 5-feet 9-inches in height, and at the Dix Park sunflower field, they are in all sizes. I’m 5-9, and I saw quite a few that were taller than me. 

The size of the crowd visiting the display Wednesday was manageable for someone like me trying to get photos. I avoided going last Saturday, when there an celebratory event planned for the field and the sunflowers. I knew it’d be impossible to get decent photos with so many people. 

It was nice to see people enjoying the display. Quite a few paused to get pictures of themselves (selfies, or someone not in their party was asked to do the honors). Many also were taking pictures of the flowers.

Interestingly, adjacent to the sunflower field was the cemetery of the former Dix psychiatric hospital. I also strolled that grounds and took pictures, which I’ll present in a subsequent post.

To view a full gallery of images from the sunflower shoot, follow the link in this sentence.  

Above and first nine photos below: These images are designed to give you an idea of the layout of the “garden” and paths through and around it. 

Above and first two photos below: These looked like they might have been pummeled downward by yesterday's hard rainfall. 

Above: The backside of a petal.

This lone sunflower (above) was drooping so low that I decided to stop and photograph it. The shot below is a crop of the flower to bring it into closer view. 

Above: I first saw these two silver objects from much farther away, looking inward at the far end of one of the dirt paths. I wasn't sure at that point what I was looking at. So I took the next path east of there and walked toward the shiny objects to investigate. As I reached this point, it was clear some people were using umbrellas to shield themselves from the hot sun rays. But the juxtaposition nevertheless made an interesting photo, I thought.

Above: An angle where some of the downtown skyline appears in the background. 

Above: This shot reminded me of the scenes in the motion picture Field of Dreams when old-time ball-playing “ghosts” disappeared into the cornfields after their games. 

Above and last four photos below: Adjacent to the sunflower field was this garden of non-sunflowers booms. I decided to grab a few shots of it, too.