Cemeteries

Just one more thing that could be done right. 

Rather than trying, with great waste of water and ultimate ugliness, to imitate a golf course [and see comparable section on “progressive g.c.’s” later] with acres of overwatered lawn sprinkled with a hodgepodge of miscellaneous trees… Return to an older and far more beautiful “boot hill” sort of graveyard like some I’ve seen in the Gold Country*, which adapt an existing rock slope or hillock with (or without) a grove of blue oak or live oak or buckeye etc shading it. But in any/all cases not irrigated, the groundcover being the native sparse grasses and wildflowers of this site. 

Useful cemeteries, that can be grazed by livestock, or better, nut tree cemeteries that are available for the use of anybody (wouldn’t you like to know that your grave is of some use at least to the birds and squirrels?).

• In foothills: native oaks etc
• In the big valleys: valley oak, or other riparian trees (especially sycamore if near a river/creek), or some kind of nut trees, especially pecan, walnut, or even almond or pistachio? 

A way for clients to buy into protecting a valuable piece of nature as a final goodwill gesture. 

Or best of all? Just choose a nice bit of existing nature (e.g. a blue oak grove) and dig no graves at all, but scatter ashes at random or place in little vessels with modest markers, or markers all together in one shrinelike place, or none at all.

Or, for those of you who still insist on a lawn for a blanket, and for those cemetery managers who are constrained to continue in the lawn-growing business indefinitely, the least that could be done, as with the case of other pointlessly irrigated landscapes, is to take full advantage of the irrigation by planting as many water-loving deciduous trees as will reasonably fit. And not just any such trees either, and emphatically not any of those over-planted “cliche” trees like London plane and liquidambar, but really choice, fine trees from among the vast array of species that the woods of the easter U.S. and eastern Asia have to offer. And, obviously, in such proportions and combinations as make a credible picture rather than a hodgepodge. 

*In fact, most of the older cemeteries throughout California are not irrigated, including those around my own hometown on the coast; these “dry” cemeteries invariably have far more character, more mystery and nostalgia about them than any of the later, more pretentious “golf course” style cemeteries.