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More burial sites are forgoing pristine lawns for drought resistant plants and wildflowers that help wildlife. Efforts picked up in the pandemic.
Across the country, where the dead lie, life is increasingly thriving.
It’s happening in Catholic and Jewish cemeteries; in burial grounds up and down the East and West coasts and in the Bible Belt; in sprawling private graveyards that double as public greenspaces, and in century-old potter’s fields.
Groundskeepers, deacons, horticulturists, conservationists, arborists and newly minted gardeners are changing how they tend to burial sites. They are letting grasses grow longer and reducing how much they mow. They’re ripping out invasive plants, encouraging native shrubs to thrive, forgoing pesticides, and replacing manicured turfgrass with wildflower meadows.
Cemeteries have often been the largest green spaces in cities, providing vital havens for wildlife. But during the pandemic, many of them grew especially popular as spots where people could safely gather and enjoy pastoral settings. In 2020, Laurel Hill, a 265-acre historic cemetery straddling the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania, saw its attendance more than double. Green-Wood in Brooklyn, with 478 acres of rolling hills, lush plantings, thousands of trees and serene vistas, counted 200,000 new visitors.
The surge coincided with an effort underway by Green-Wood and other cemeteries to swap swaths of manicured lawns for meadows filled with wildflowers and drought resistant native shrubs. Earlier attempts to let grass grow longer at Green-Wood had been met with fierce resistance. But as people sought solace in nature during pandemic lockdowns, they brought with them a new openness.
“We’ve seen a huge sea change in terms of people’s willingness to accept this,” said Joseph Charap, Green-Wood’s vice president of horticulture, as he wound his way through one of the cemetery’s new meadows one sunny day in late November, feathery goldenrod and milkweed pods catching the afternoon light. “The reaction was, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful.’”
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