Category: Nature

You can’t spell cemETERy without TREE.

~ cwirka

Rarely are human edifices and nature so aligned as a park cemetery. It’s telling that humans are most harmonious with nature when dead. Seems kinda obvious now that I’ve written it out.

ANYWAY – I love trees in cemeteries. Partly because they are beautiful. They really set the mood. But I also love what trees represent. And what they can represent.

The nice thing about cemetery trees as symbols is that they always “work”. If you were walking through a graveyard and see a headstone with the symbol of an upside-down torch, you’d know it had specific meaning. What that meaning is – likely no idea. And that symbolism can be lost to time. In a few thousand years archaeologists are going to think, “these people didn’t understand fire AT ALL – or they’re magic!” (Probably not, but still the specific meaning may be lost without taking it to “ancient aliens created the pyramids” level of stupidity)

Trees are beyond this. A tree as a symbol of life and growth seems obvious enough. But much more importantly – trees don’t need to be symbols to be valuable. Trees are successful just by being trees. Was it put there deliberately? By chance? (You never get a carving of a skull with wings by chance)

The tree is inextricably tied to seasons. Being part of the cycle of life and death, trees serve as a simple reminder of our place in time and nature. 

Do I have any favorite cemetery trees? Why thank you for asking.

The Yew Tree

Look, a lot of tree species are in the running for best cemetery tree, the yew comes up often. And why not? They can live hundreds of years, outlasting many generations and remaining a living symbol for a long time. Its association with life and death makes sense in a way – the yew is exceptionally toxic and dangerous if humans consume it, yet the Japanese and Native Americans both used the yew for healing properties. And a slightly darker connection to death – the yew went nearly extinct in parts of England thanks to the Hundred Years War – the English’s advantage often attributed to their long bows, made out of yew. Guns came along and saved the yew. Thanks guns (find the silver linings)! (1)(2)

Death Becomes Yew

The Hardy Tree

Sadly, this tree has recently fallen. But a truly special and strange graveyard tree. Thomas Hardy, poet and novelist, quite good, I’d say, was a young man at an architecture firm that had to move some graves at St. Pancras Old Church in London. Make way for the rapidly expanding underground transit! 1860’s – What a time to be alive. Bodies were exhumed and moved; Mr. Hardy saw it fit to arrange the leftover headstones in a nice little ring around this ash tree. And it grew in and around the graves until 2022, when the tree succumbed to a fungus that had infected it in 2014. Fittingly, the caretakers knew the end was coming, just not exactly when, so the tree was getting in-home hospice care. (3)

Roger William’s Apple Tree

More commonly known as The Apple Tree that Ate Roger Williams, but that’s too sensationalistic for me. The founder of Rhode Island was originally given a less than dignified burial in an unnotable and undernoted grave.  It was 200 years later, in 1860 (apparently the heyday for cemetery tree news), when they dug ol’ Roge up, only to find a sizable root had grown right through him – even splitting at the legs. And an apple tree no less! Cemeteries, apple trees, founder mythology – it’s all very New England. (4)

Any good tree/grave combo

See picture. The symbolism is bursting out…

Tree graves

One of the more curious grave types is the tree grave. Thick with symbolism – sometimes shaped as a cross, or a series of logs for mom, dad, etc., or sometimes just a stump to signify too short a life. There’s also the unavoidable symbol of carving a living thing out of rock to memorialize the dead while surrounded by living versions of the carving. Weird. A lot of the tree carving can be attributed to Woodmen of the World, an organization founded to provide life insurance to rural families. If you were game for getting a grave that looks like a stump, they’d chip in. Their symbolism is inspired from the idea of pioneers clearing out the woods to provide for their families, which is fine, but totally lost on everyone today. (5)

Has anyone used petrified wood as a gravestone? I think that’s a great idea. Maybe carve it into a life-like tree? Wood that became stone and has existed for millions of years carved back into a tree to memorialize a death – can you have too much symbolism?

A time to harvest, a time to fall

~ cwirka
A very temporal album

Best said by Ecclesiastes through Pete Seeger1 to the Byrds – 

To everything (Bible)
Turn, turn, turn (Seeger)
There is a season (Bible)
Turn, turn, turn (Seeger)
And a time to every purpose under Heaven (Seeger Bible)

The seasons are turning! Autumn is in the air and I am delighted. There are so many visceral joys of the season – the crisp air hitting your nose in the morning, the satisfying crunch of walking through leaves, not to mention the wonderful crunch of a crisp apple, as well as the many things that don’t involve “crisp” or “crunch.”

But my love of autumn is related to both to the immediate feeling of the season as well as what it represents.

The true beauty of autumn is its ephemerality. It’s a season in constant movement. If you want summer heat all the time – deserts and beaches are ready and waiting for you. Love the verdant growth of spring? Rain forests should do the trick nicely. And winter locations are both plentiful and obvious. But you can never have Forever Fall (TM – Emo band name). The season of autumn is the feeling of change, that’s its essence! It is the season where the passage of time can be easily witnessed in the nature. Death is part of the story. So is preparation. And rejoicing. Autumn has it all.

For the better part of the past 1500 years in the western world, Fall/Autumn was called “Harvest” – it was the season and the activity (“I summer at the shore, but harvest at the farm”). Harvest was a big part of life for most – reaping what you sow was never more literal. It’s the time of year for the farmer to collect crops and slaughter animals and celebrate! But also there is cleaning and preparing. Ensuring the winter will be survivable and the spring will be ready. You don’t just reap and quit! And you don’t skip reaping one year just because it’s not what speaks to you! Harvest is part of the cycle of life!

And much like autumn itself, reaping is best enjoyed contextually. Its highs are higher when considered what comes before and after. You’ve gotten through the hard work of spring and the hot work of summer. And you know you’ll have to prepare for winter. But take a minute to gather and enjoy your success.

Dance of Death
Petrarca, Francesco, 1304-1374

As people moved away from farming life, the term Harvest dropped away as well, to be replaced by greater usage of the word autumn and the new usage of the word Fall (apparently short for “Fall of the leaf” – so that’s… fine). But with the use of fall, the cyclical context of harvest began to drop away as well. The skeleton that had long represented death was no longer a psychopomp and part of the wheel of life, it instead becomes the Grim Reaper, a haunting figure to be avoided at all costs. He reaps only in the greedy, capitalist way – taking without ever having sown and with no plans to plant. Pete Seeger (and probably the Bible) would not be on board. As Mr. Seeger said, “To My Old Brown Earth”

To my old brown earth
And to my old blue sky
I'll now give these last few molecules of "I"

People tied to labor -whether during the middle ages, the industrial revolution, or the modern age- seem to have a more holistic connection to death. A better understanding of their place in the greater cycle of things. Joe Hill, labor activist and songwriter in the early 1900’s, was a key contributor to the Little Red Song Book (one of Seeger’s favorite books). His last contribution to the book was his own will, written the form of a song (a practice that never really took off, best I can tell):

My will is easy to decide
For there is nothing to divide
My kin don't need to fuss and moan
"Moss does not cling to rolling stone"

My body? Oh, if I could choose
I would to ashes it reduce2
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow

Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my Last and final Will.
Good Luck to All of you
Joe Hill

Autumn is a season that shows how death has a place within our world as a part of life – not outside of it. Fall is fleeting – but what isn’t? Ecclesiastes says it best: A time to dance, a time to mourn

  1. Mr. Seeger was reasonable about his claim to authorship – splitting the song royalties 55% / 45% with the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions. In a 2002 interview with Acoustic Guitar magazine, Pete Seeger said, “With ‘Turn, Turn, Turn’ I wanted to send 45 percent, because [in addition to the music] I did write six words (“I swear it’s not too late” at the end) and one more word repeated three times, so I figured I’d keep five percent of the royalties for the words.”​ ↩︎
  2. And cremated he was! On January 3rd, 1917 his ashes were sent out in 600 envelopes to fellow activist and sympathizers, with his remains being cast to the four winds, minimum ↩︎

ComPosthumous

~ cwirka

The start of 2023 found the State of New York joining Washington, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Vermont as a state that permits human composting. Pretty great! Better for the earth. More wholesome. Nice for the fungi.

Now, despite the fact that humans have been putting bodies in the ground regularly for -oh, I dunno – over 100,000 years, there’s scant history of using human remains as an agricultural resource. Compost Magazine (yes, really), found this quote from Plutarch observing the aftermath of battle (via Agricultural History magazine):

They say that the soil, after the bodies had rotted and the winter rains had fallen, was so fertilized and saturated with the putrefied matter which sank into it, that it produced an unusual crop the next season.

Greeks weren’t the only ones to take note, the Arabs did as well. Ibn al-‘Awwām wrote the Book of Agriculture back in the 12th century or so. He too noted that “blood has prodigious virtue to revive some trees and plants” – not getting too specific about what sort of blood we’re talking about.

Of a grimmer nature is the write-up from an 1822 edition of London’s Gentleman’s Magazine:

The Nautical Register says, that “It is estimated that more that a million of bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported last year from the continent of Europe, into the port of Hull. The neighborourhood of Leipsic, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and of all the places where, during the late blood war, the principal battles were fought, have been swept alike of the bones of the hero, and the horse which he rode. Thus collected from every quarter, they have been shipped to the port of Hull, and thence forwarded to the Yorkshire bone-grinders, who have erected steam-engines and powerful machinery for the purpose of reducing them to a granulary state. (…) The oily substance of the bone gradually evolving as the bone calcines, makes a more permanent and substantial manure than almost any other substance – particularly human bones.

With all this in mind, it’s nice to see the idea of human composting as a return to earth in a positive sense, bringing about new life. As long as you don’t have Ebola or tuberculosis, you too can become plant food! While still very much a niche industry, I think it’s a path worth pursuing. It’s more environmentally friendly than other methods – the carbon emissions from cremation are terrible, and the embalming chemicals in a buried body are good for nothing but preserving the body (and bad for just about everything else). Plus, what a nice “full circle” way to wrap up. 

I’m still hoping for a sky burial (oh to be interred in an oxymoron…), but this is a good plan(t) B.

Death Bee-comes You!

~ cwirka
Bee tombstone from the Bosdrift Cemetery in Hilversum (Netherlands). From Henk van Kampen’s flickr account

Humans and bees have long been intertwined in their lives (and their deaths) – From agriculture to society to religion, bees have been part of the story.

Humans keep looking to bees for answers and inspiration: The Fable of the Bees is a early 18th century version of Wall Street’s “Greed is good!” Drive around Utah, and you’ll see the hive everywhere, symbolizing industriousness, or, as initially was the case of the Mormons, the kingdom of God.

Above, a bee presents a honeycomb to the Olympian gods in the clouds; below, bees are flying into and out of two wicker beehives; illustration of a fable – Francis Barlow, 1668. Wellcome Collection

Unsurprisingly, bees have been wrapped up in death as well as life. And not just in their “killer” form. Nowhere is this better evidenced by the 18th and 19th century practice of Telling the Bees. In the United States (particularly New England) and Western Europe, if someone in the house passes away, the bees must be informed. You informed them? Great, now give them some time to mourn. Hives are covered with appropriately black cloth, giving the hive time to come to terms with the loss of a member of the family. There’s a whole poem about it, fittingly titled “Telling the Bees” (the fella who wrote the poem, John Greenleaf Whittier, was a pretty excellent Quaker Abolitionist, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and the writer of a poem that was incorrectly attributed to Ethan Allen for 60 years, I guess Mr. Whittier just never brought it up).

Bees handle death within their hive in their own way (no informing anyone, no mourning cloth). A small percentage of bees are “undertaker bees” – pulling dead bees out of the hive and dropping them a respectful (safe) distance from the hive. They are very quick – sometimes taking less than an hour to spot a deceased comrade and getting it out of the house. And curiously, they seem to be able to identify the dead bees by what they’re not giving off, which sounds very vibes based, but it’s not.


Bees by Sebastian. Brandt – 1580 – Wellcome Collection, United Kingdom

Bees are great. Any creature that can make a food that never spoils must be something special.