Cemeteries: They're not just for the dead and flesh-eating zombies anymore. If you're like us, you grew up with more than slight fear of what might lurk amidst the gravestones, and watching George Romero's "Night of the Living Dead'' didn't help. Neither did camping out in a friend's yard whose family lived across from the local cemetery. (That friend was buried there after an auto accident.)

But in recent years we've been won over by the tranquility and beauty of graveyards such as the Mt. Auburn Cemetery and especially Forest Hills Cemetery. Both of these were designed by Henry Dearborn, a collector of taxes for the port of Boston and also, arguably, America's first landscape architect. Dearborn, who finished Forest Hills in 1848, died two years later and was buried there - his grave features a neo-classical column - as are his parents, whose bodies were transported to the site. They are designated as burials No. 1 and No. 2.

"One thing the Victorians had was a more comfortable relationship to mortality and maybe there's something we can learn from that,'' says Cecily Miller, executive director of the Forest Hills Educational Trust. "They created a place where the living and dead could connect. Instead of having a cemetery as a bleak ghetto where the dead are relegated to being forgotten, they built these lovely, comfortable spaces and engaged their best architects and artists and pioneered landscape design."

Forest Hills has a free exhibit, "Dwelling: Memory, Architecture and Place,'' that's up through Oct. 31. "This exhibit to try and see the cemetery through Victorian eyes, with a contemporary interpretation. There are 15 pieces - a sound piece, a piece you access by cell phone, a real range of media. Artists have come out with quite different objects and ideas. They tried to relate to the idea of domestic space and final home. By bringing nature into this, you have this sense of larger world and universe so your individual life is put in this larger context. And the Victorians remembered people very much as individuals."

That, Miller adds, means Forest Hills is a departure from the usual cemetery of repetitive stones, no feel for nature and the impression that no one person really mattered. Forest Hills, Miller says, delivers another message: "This is your life, live it to the fullest."

We took in the exhibit and just soaked up the greenery while marveling at the art. The "dwellings" include Jason Middlebrook's totem pole-like stack of birdhouses and Jay Cumming's "Family Lot,'' a typical Victorian family gravesite laid out in cement in Lake Hibiscus.

You can visit during regular hours (7 a.m. to 8 p.m.) without charge, There are also $8 walking tours where scholars and artists will take you through the exhibit and cemetery.

New wrinkle: On Friday Oct. 27 at Forsyth Chapel Halsey Burgund and guests play a performance piece commissioned for hte exhibition. It's called "One Hundred and Four Thousand." Burgund recorded people out at the cemetary - gravesite visitors, birdwatchers, an aborist - and wove those fragments and stories into music that is both electroniic and traditional. Peter Bailey, Michael O'Connor, Javier Caballero, Bekka Schellenberg and Bennett Miller join for this 8 p.m., $8 concert..

95 Forest Hills Ave., Jamaica Plain, 617-524-0128, foresthillstrust.org/dwelling/dwelling_intro.html