Forest of Memories

Times and Star

CONTROVERSIAL plans for a green burial ground at Lorton are likely to be refused, more than two years after they were first submitted.

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By Clare Paterson, It’s your funeral (blog)

Very few people make plans for their own funerals despite most of them thinking it would be a good idea, according to recently published research. My grandmother pre-paid her funeral as a matter of course. She knew what she’d be getting, that it would be paid for and that it would be done according to her wishes. Today that’s not the fashion although curiously there is now a massive consumer market and a baffling array of choices not available in her day. Some people do want to choose for themselves rather than leaving a myriad decisions about cremation, burial, rockets, urns, natural burial grounds, church, chipboard, wood and the rest to the bereaved.

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By Caroline McClatchey, Sunday Telegraph

More than 30,000 funerals in Britain last year were nonreligious, as families turn increasingly to “celebration-of-life” ceremonies rather than church services, according to new figures.

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The Hereford Times

A Turner Prize-nominated funerary artist from Herefordshire has unveiled her latest creation - a sustainable boat-shaped coffin.

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By Val Sweeney, The Inverness Courier

A DISUSED cabbage field, for most people, is probably not the most obvious place to bury their loved ones. But it was in such a field that family and friends gathered 10 years ago this week to bury my father.

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New sites planned to meet woodland plots demand

By Jenifer Johnston, Sunday Herald

EVERYONE IN Scotland will have the option of a woodland burial within five years, experts predict, as a raft of new sites come under consideration for eco-friendly graveyards.

Scotland currently has seven woodland or natural burial sites, but this is set to rise dramatically in the coming years.

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By Anna Millar, Scotland on Sunday

IT MAY look like a laundry basket, but this is increasingly the future for those of us who - not to put too fine a point on it - have no future. The wicker coffin is rapidly emerging as the way to carry on being green for eternity. The woven cane caskets don’t cost the earth, either in terms of environmental damage or - at around £500 cheaper than a wooden version - hard cash.

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by Bonnie Alter, Treehugger

Amidst the hustle of daily life, the death of a loved one makes friends and relations stop and reconsider. The question of how to honour and respect the individuality and beliefs that were central to their life can get lost with the shock.

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By Robert Colville, The Telegraph

The baby boomer generation, pioneers of the green movement, is taking environmental activism to the grave with ethical burials. Funerals designed to have a minimal impact on the environment are the fastest-growing trend in the market, according to specialist funeral directors springing up across the country.

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Woodland burial grounds are fast becoming the resting place of choice.

By Jonny Beardsall, The Telegraph

Woodland burials are the future. With growing demand for spaces in conventional cemeteries, as well as rising maintenance costs and increasing problems of vandalism, more and more people are coming round to the idea of ending up under a tree instead of a dreary headstone. But should you die soon and have no woodland burial site close by - and there are only about 200 in Britain - your relatives may be forced to overlook your last wishes.

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