Tag: Cemetery

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?

Perpetual self-care (Sweating in the cemetery)

~ cwirka

I volunteered at Green-Wood Cemetery this past weekend. I spent the hot and muggy morning weeding and mulching and sweating and thinking. A graveyard is a relaxing spot for gardening.

There’s probably some lesson or metaphor within the activity of pulling living weeds out of the same spot we are regularly depositing dead people. It’s hard not to think about how we, in our very human (and arguably unfair) way, make the declaration of what is a “weed”. It turns out, in this case, it’s Bermuda Grass. Particularly amusing because of our close proximity to the Caribbean neighborhood of Flatbush and the proliferation of these-can’t-possibly-be-legal weed shops.

So I focus my weekend energy on the weeds – pulling them up so that some other plants have a better shot. And I think it’s this orderliness that often draws us to cemeteries. The unpredictability of death and our inability to make it stick to our schedule results in a whole flurry of organization once life is over. That’s when we have a chance to wrap our hands and heads around it – living is changing, and it’s quite a challenge to organize something that keeps changing. 

So it’s little surprise that we see such orderliness in cemeteries and memorials, crypts and tombs. It’s particularly telling that “mass graves” are a true sign of butchery and horrors of war – a lost last chance to tidy things up and honor those gone. While death continues to frustrate efforts at an orderly life, we humans jump at the chance to categorize (living vs. dead) and organize (cemetery, block, plot, etc). Of course, there are those who have no interest at all these things, post-life. For there are those who admirably go so far away from organization- wishing one’s body fully back to the earth, as if to say, “well, clearly my way of organizing the world is now irrelevant; nature, back to you!” Ashes to ashes. Mulch to mulch. A magnet to the hard drive. Death isn’t the hands of a clock stopping. Death is the absence of those hands at all. That person no longer exists in time. A zombie or vampire is scary for many reasons – but I’d argue that one of the most troubling elements is a person changing AFTER death. How could it still be them? When a person dies, they are frozen in time. Death should provide the final image, a cessation change of “who a person was”. Ghosts, angels, spirits – they do not exist in time the way the living do. For the believer, it would be silly to envision an ancestor’s ghost getting “older” or an archangel coming down a little worse for the wear after all these years. The corporal part can do nothing after death but decay… why would we want to bring that back?!

In short time, weeding had my very real and physical body covered in perspiration. I’d hazard to guess my mental state was a little sweaty as well. I decided to sit for a moment near the pond. The fountain sprung to, well, not life, as it were – but the fountain started fountaining away. Dragonflies zipped about with their overaggressive maneuvers, no doubt because they can never put those wings away. I later looked up “Dragonfly symbolism” to see how it might relate to death. And, like every symbol – it depends on who you talk to. Which I guess serves as symbolism itself. What’s a weed? What’s death? What’s a dragonfly mean? Those are very human questions. Most questions are.

Soon I was back to battling the tenacious Bermuda grass. I was helping a young tree, itself a growing reminder of a loved one no longer on our timeline. I noticed how much mental classifying I was doing. This plant is a weed. This plant is a willow. This plant is a Memorial. This plant is mulch.

It’s telling that much of our reliable historical data comes from death records, grave sites, crypts and the like. Our understanding of the world prior to us, whether it’s 100 or 10,000 years ago, comes from looking at the dead and their markers. What’s to say this weeding isn’t a bit of long-term maintenance on some of humanity’s record keeping?