To Be a Field of Poppies | Hacker News Reader

To Be a Field of Poppies

harpers.org

14 pointsnobet10 comments

http://web.archive.org/web/20210921230754/https://harpers.or...

It's a good idea, but i have the same problem with it as cremation and scattering of the ashes. I always thought of cemeteries as places for the living, not the dead. Places meant to keep memories alive. But maybe I'm wrong and we have better ways to do that today anyway. The idea from the article is in any case appealing for a lot of reasons.

I believe that cemeteries and human composting are compatible ideas - just instead of a buried box, each grave marker is placed next to a plot that is filled with the compost, and in which a tree is planted. 100 years from now, you'll have large majestic trees in the middle, with younger trees growing to the edges. It would be a forest instead of a park, with all the ecological benefits that woodlands bring.

It's hard and expensive to maintain a forest for people to visit.

100 years from now, without an extraordinarily MASSIVE care fund, you would have a bramble full of weeds, with a few of the planted trees still alive, but certainly full of volunteer and other trees who grew accidentally, instead of on purpose. The memorial trees would die and need to be removed, much to the chagrin of the families, I would assume, based on how sensitive most people are about the memorials for family members that I've seen.

It's cheap to mow grass in a relatively flat field full of stones. Stones don't die, and really only need to be cleaned up every two or three years to stay looking new. Occasionally you may have to reset one on its base, if the original base is not deep or substantial enough.

Source: I sit on a cemetery board as the treasurer, and have actually planted and still maintain a small 50 acre woods on our farm.

I have my own 20 acres of forest, too. I know how much effort it takes. And I agree - it would take work and money. And yes, there would be some culture change required to accept that your trees are not permanent, and to accept that other plants and trees will share the space. Yet at the same time, doesn't it feel like a healthier end result to have a natural resource that came from our deaths vs. a fairly nondescript patch of grass with a bunch of stones? Even if it does take a bit more work and money? After all, we're talking an incremental increase, not a 10x increase.

I really don’t understand what you are saying. Nature makes forests naturally that are great to visit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_succession

The timescales involved in that are not realistic for a memorial garden. No family in the world is going to be okay with consigning their dead relatives to a patch of scrub brush, brambles, and half-dead and diseased locust trees.

Is that what your forest is? Mine isn't, nor are most of the ones I hike through. Even the patch that we started to let grow wild 15 years ago and have barely touched is simply thicker with saplings and ground cover, not a mess of brambles and sick trees.

There are different types of forests, of course - maybe yours has a different makeup of species than the ones near me.

That's what mine started as, and what most fallow ground around here turns into within the first few years, and seems to want to stay indefinitely.

I figured out pretty early on in my life on my farmette that active maintenance and guided growth is necessary for a timescale of anything less than my and my children's entire lives to see the fruit of my labor. So now I have a beautiful woods of native hardwoods, but I am losing the fight to multi-flora rose and grape vines right now because I got lazy last year and didn't mow them.

Any ground left unmaintained around here follows the same pattern. Invasive species first (multi-flora rose, honeysuckle, crown vetch, those sorts of things), followed by brambles and native bushes with some fast growing trees (the locust I talked about as well as honey locust, river birch, red cedar, red haw, native honeysuckle, various vines, blackberry and raspberry).

That's pretty much where it stays for, well, honestly I don't know. Because any field around me that has gotten to that point in my lifetime is still there unless someone started maintaining it actively. I assume the slower growing trees follow (Oak, Hard Maple, Hickory, Chestnuts, Other nuts), but like I said, in my lifetime, I've never seen a patch get to that point without active maintenance.

You are right. I meant it more for the case stated in the article, where people don't know what to do with all the compost, so it ends up in the forest.

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