Aside from the additions to the property and the building of the sea wall, there have been few changes to Ross Bay Cemetery since 1873. One thing that you will notice while visiting the grounds is the pleasant number of trees. Most of these were not there when the cemetery opened, although some are over a hundred years old. As you can see in the picture in the "History" section, the cemetery was quite bare in the 1880s. Most of the trees were planted in the 1930s, under the direction of the Victoria Parks Department. In fact, the Parks Department of Victoria formerly used Ross Bay Cemetery as a kind of warehouse of tree species. Whenever the city needed to plant some more trees along its boulevards, it would start with clippings from the trees at the cemetery. Today, many trees in the city have "roots" in Ross Bay Cemetery.
The few willows that you see in the cemetery were planted in the 1930s and 1940s. Although very pretty and symbolic, weeping willows are not trees that you usually see planted in a cemetery. Willow trees are usually planted in damp ground to dry out the land by soaking up ground water. Having weeping willows meant the ground was wet and this was not a good sign for a burial ground at all! With the gentle slope of the ground down to the ocean, Ross Bay Cemetery has no need for this tree to serve any purpose other than to cast some pleasant shade on a hot summer’s day.
Not everyone who is buried in Ross Bay Cemetery was originally buried there. The first transfers came when the Old Burying Ground (Pioneer Square) was closed. Only a few of the approximately 1000 remains were moved from there to Ross Bay Cemetery in the 1870s and 1880s. Later, others came from the Songhees Indian Reserve on Victoria’s Inner Harbour when it was sold for development in 1912. Some of these graves were moved to Esquimalt, west of the City, but the Roman Catholic graves were moved to Ross Bay Cemetery. The last set of transfers came when St. Ann’s Academy was purchased by the provincial government in the 1970s. Up until 1908, the Sisters who died while at St. Ann’s Academy (a convent) were buried in consecrated ground there. The Sisters who died after that was full were buried in a separate area in Section U of Ross Bay Cemetery. When the government bought St. Ann’s, the old graves were exhumed and moved to the Ross Bay plot to rest with the other Sisters.