After Life in the Garden

This can be a depressing time of year to be a landscape designer. For those of us connected to the earth, winter has long been synonymous with death: the dark days, the cold nights, the metaphoric passing of dormant plants and hibernating animals. In fact, ancient cultures often assigned their duties to the same god. In these cases though spring returns life to the leafless maple, spurs seeds to sprout and wakes the groundhog from his metaphorical death. True physical death is much less forgiving and yet, even it clears the way for new life to thrive. In the garden death is not just part of the cycle – it is part of the landscape.

Every gardener knows that decomposition is the root of good soil, which is after all why we compost, but a new movement seeks to allow humans the option to return to the earth as well. These so-called “green burials” are done without the use of toxic embalming fluids, caskets or markers. In some cases these communal burial sites become a sort of park where the living can go to remember their dead or even to celebrate life itself.

The idea of cemetery as park is not so new. Laurel Hill in Philadelphia, WoodlawnCemetery in the Bronx and Mount Auburn outside Boston were all some of their city’s first dedicated green spaces. In an effort to relieve the overcrowding in church burial grounds these new non-denominational cemeteries offered beautiful grounds to not only honor the dead but also stroll, picnic and socialize. Much like a sculpture garden, the monuments and mausoleums in these cemeteries are beautiful works of art positioned among beautiful vignettes.

Rotunda-like Mary Baker Eddy Monument, designed by Egerton Swartwout, reflected in Halcyon Lake.

It is not uncommon to plant something of remembrance on one’s grave. Old cemeteries are often the source of heirloom rose varieties, lilacs and spring bulbs but I also recall an article in National Geographics years ago that described how in another country, land was so scarce and precious that poor families in urban areas would use their relatives graves to grow food. I couldn't find any current reference to this practice but is it really so different from growing flowers there?

I, for one, would be much more comfortable with the idea of returning to the soil, having people picnic on my grave or even grow food on it than I am with the thought of spending eternity in one of the of high density, easy to maintain plots available these days with their flat, uniformly sized markers and time limit on the display of flowers.

If you have enough money though, there is apparently another alternative. A client of a company I once worked for hired us to landscape his prominent Main Line family’s cemetery plot. We designed a grandiose arch bearing the family name, which we were having fabricated by Haddonstone – a very pricey English garden sculpture company - and planting mature trees. What I found most pretentious about this man’s plot though is that he chose the location specifically to sit above that of his business competitor’s so that he could “look down on him for all eternity.”

It seems the egos of some will long outlast their body ...

 http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pyramids/khufu.html