Native plants in cemeteries

Among the overlooked factors in the care and maintenance of today's contemporary cemetery is the problem of keeping those lawns green and those plants healthy.

As any self-educated lawn doctor will tell you, it can take a lot of fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and water to make these final resting places look like "Amen Corner." All that added stuff adds stress to your plants, and all it does in the end is make the cycle more vicious.

One way to combat these problems is to become "au naturel." It's a small, but important step toward returning our cemeteries to the places of natural beauty that they once were, back during the establishment of the rural cemetery movement of the 19th century. Back then, cemeteries were established outside the crowded city limits and designed to draw the public for parks and other recreational activities and to give them the chance to experience nature up close.

How times have changed.

Some folks in California have the right idea. At the Old City Cemetery in Sacramento (picture of poppies, above), the native plant society has established a native plant garden to demonstrate the effectiveness of such greenery in attracting pollinators and other beneficial creatures. The primary goal of the project is to demonstrate how home gardeners can utilize native plants, but another consequence - intended or unintended, we don't care - is to beautify a long-neglected cemetery.

Natives "know the language," so to speak; they are less prone to the cyclical climate changes that can hurt exotics and other non-natives introduced into cemeteries. And, in this day of concerns over water supplies, natives need less water to survive, because they are in their normal habitat.

Similar things are going on all over the country - as we'll attempt to point out here. Another quick find was the Mulkey Cemetery in Eugene, Oregon, which is among a growing number of cemeteries offering "green-burial" option, right down to the native plants that surround your loved one's final resting place.