Across the country, where the dead lie, life is increasingly thriving.
It’s happening in Catholic and Jewish cemeteries; in burial grounds up and down the East and West coasts and in the Bible Belt; in sprawling private graveyards that double as public greenspaces, and in century-old potter’s fields.
Groundskeepers, deacons, horticulturists, conservationists, arborists and newly minted gardeners are changing how they tend to burial sites. They are letting grasses grow longer and reducing how much they mow. They’re ripping out invasive plants, encouraging native shrubs to thrive, forgoing pesticides, and replacing manicured turfgrass with wildflower meadows.
Cemeteries have often been the largest green spaces in cities, providing vital havens for wildlife. But during the pandemic, many of them grew especially popular as spots where people could safely gather and enjoy pastoral settings. In 2020, Laurel Hill, a 265-acre historic cemetery straddling the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, saw its attendance more than double. Green-Wood in Brooklyn, with 478 acres of rolling hills, lush plantings, thousands of trees and serene vistas, counted 200,000 new visitors.
The surge coincided with an effort underway by Green-Wood and other cemeteries to swap swaths of manicured lawns for meadows filled with wildflowers and drought resistant native shrubs. Earlier attempts to let grass grow longer at Green-Wood had been met with fierce resistance. But as people sought solace in nature during pandemic lockdowns, they brought with them a new openness.
“We’ve seen a huge sea change in terms of people’s willingness to accept this,” said Joseph Charap, Green-Wood’s vice president of horticulture, as he wound his way through one of the cemetery’s new meadows one sunny day in late November, feathery goldenrod and milkweed pods catching the afternoon light. “The reaction was, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’”
Green-Wood is among the earliest cemeteries in the country to be modeled after rural landscapes, and to serve as an urban park. The first was Mount Auburn, founded in 1831 outside of Boston. Others include Laurel Hill in Pennsylvania and Evergreens Cemetery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. All are arboretums, filled with thousands of trees, and located in the Atlantic Flyway, a major migratory route for birds.
Each one has converted some of their land in recent years to wild, native meadows, working with a firm founded by Larry Weaner, the pioneering ecological landscape designer.
“I’ve been kind of blindsided by how many cemeteries reached out,” said Mr. Weaner, whose firm has worked with five cemeteries in the last five years. “There definitely is a movement afoot.”
Cemetery operators said there were myriad reasons to replace lawns or turf grass with native shrubs and other plants. Lawn mowers are loud, often polluting and heavy, compacting soil and hastening erosion. Thirsty turf grass fares poorly during the droughts that are growing longer and more intense. There is also mounting awareness of the harms from pesticides and irrigation, and a growing recognition that greener practices can help wildlife while making a cemetery more resilient to a changing climate.
Mount Auburn even has a full-time ecologist, Paul Kwiatkowski. In recent times, he said Mount Auburn has reforested pockets of land, replaced fertilizer with compost, removed invasive plants and non-native trees, and added perennial plantings to attract beneficial insects and create a food source and cover for other wildlife. One area, called Consecration Dell, was restored with trees and plantings that provide for birds, mammals, and amphibians, including spotted salamanders that live under leaf litter on its slopes. “When you’re there, you feel like you’re out in the woods,” Mr. Kwiatkowski said.
The trend toward rewilding cemeteries is not limited to stately sites. In neighborhoods across Dallas, Julie Fineman, a photographer, is leading an effort, called the Constellation of Living Memorials, to transform neglected historic graveyards from weed-choked lots into wildlife habitats that help mitigate city heat.
“This is an answer to climate change, and correcting our previous disconnect with nature,” she said.
If the pandemic helped more people reconnect with nature, it also reshaped how people envisioned their own ends. Interest in “green burials,” where bodies are laid to rest without embalming fluids and in biodegradable caskets or shrouds, surged during Covid-19, said Lee Webster, past president of the Green Burial Council. According to the New Hampshire Funeral Resources, Education and Advocacy, a nonprofit organization, there now are 430 cemeteries nationwide that allow green burials, nearly a fourfold increase from 2015.
Gregg Tepper, senior horticulturist at Laurel Hill, said rising demand for green burials prompted the expansion of natural areas that benefitted birds and other wildlife. “When you enter the areas, especially in the spring and summer, they are gorgeous,” he said.
Joseph Placious, a deacon at Ascension Garden Catholic cemetery, outside Rochester, New York, said the butterfly-dotted green burial area was expanded three times in four years to keep up with demand.
“I think they find natural burial is one more way, the last way, that they can help save the earth,” he said.
Billy Campbell, an environmentally-minded medical doctor, is credited with opening the first nature preserve that doubled as a burial site, Ramsey Creek Preserve, in rural South Carolina in 1998. The site has since doubled in size to 78 acres.
One of the first people to buy a plot was a conservative “crusty old Vietnam vet,” Dr. Campbell said.
“He said, ‘Look Billy, I love the woods, it’s you environmentalists I don’t like,’” Dr. Campbell recalled, adding that the man’s widow still visits the site in a car covered in stickers supporting President-elect Donald J. Trump.
“Most of the burials these days are evangelical Christians,” Dr. Campbell continued. “More than just saving the land, it’s a way of getting people to bond to the land and see it as something special.”
Still, the popular image of a cemetery as a place of neatly arranged rows of headstones poking out of pristine lawns is strong. The sight of unkempt grasses or plants at graveyards can be disturbing to those who interpret it as neglect and disrespect.
In 2019, Mr. Charap weathered intense blowback after he decided to stop mowing 200 acres at Green-Wood. He wanted to cut down on carbon emissions and fight invasive Bermuda grass, which thrives in disturbed soil, something graveyards have in spades. But as the grass grew long, complaints poured in about overgrown lots, weeds and obscured headstones.
“I don’t think we really consider the cognitive grip that the American lawn has on our psyches,” Mr. Charap said, as he walked along one of the cemetery’s paths. “As someone who stewards and landscapes this, ultimately I don’t want to cause any emotional distress.”
The mowing resumed.
Mr. Charap and Sara Evans, director of the arboretum, tried another tack. They used mailers, social media posts and signs to make the case for the mowing the place less. They noted that Green-Wood’s steep glacial slopes were treacherous for groundskeepers to access, and that headstones were often damaged by lawn equipment. By then, the pandemic had struck.
“It really did impact the long term receptiveness,” Ms. Evans said, on a tour of the cemetery one recent fall day.
Meadows now fill around 40 acres of the cemetery, and less frequent mowings and longer grass allowed other plants to flower, providing nectar and pollen for foraging bees and butterflies. Passing old mausoleums, Mr. Charap and Ms. Evans pointed out native trees that had self propagated, their seeds carried by birds or the wind. The cemetery staff has also planted trees native to southern climates that are drought and fire resistant, an adjustment as the planet warms.
Ms. Evans climbed a hill, one of the oldest areas in the cemetery, where Mr. Weaner’s firm designed an experimental meadow, a swaying sea of warm russets and silky browns. The meadows required no irrigation and, as they grew, several grassland bird species were spotted there.
Ms. Evans paused, and pointed out the contrast between the meadowland and a nearby stretch of headstones springing from grass turned brown by drought, a scene not unlike a suburban Halloween-themed yard.
“This is my own philosophy,” she said, as she took in the horsemint, white beardtongue, mountain mint and butterfly weed filling the meadow, “but this situation is more comforting, and makes me feel that life goes on after death.”
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