The Order of The Good Death

Green (not Soylent) Death Art

I’m just going to say it — Art surrounding natural burial can be tacky. “End of Life Shamans” who come to your house and burn incense and decorate your cardboard casket with glitter. It’s difficult to find good artistic death projects and even more difficult to find good green artistic death projects.

Enjoy this hot mess.

It seems like the good business is coming out of design colleges, where plucky industrial design students see the schmaltz usually associated with modern death wares and appreciate an untapped market. Godspeed, little design angels!

Take Margaret Ruyant, from the International School of Design.

This is her urn called PoeTree. Your dead friend/brother/lover is cremated and their ashes placed in a cork urn. When you take the urn home, you place a wee boxwood sapling and dirt in the urn on top of the ashes. Then you plant the cork portion in the ground, which will slowly degrade as the tree grows. Ashes spread with the roots and a ceramic ring with the deceased’s information remains around the base of the tree.

I think this is lovely, but there all sorts of haters commenting on how “boxwoods smell like cat piss” and “that shit’s just a hedge.” Haters gon’ hate, Margaret, you just keep doing your thing. A boxwood is way better than the guy who told me to take his uncle’s ashes and flush them down the toilet with some salt and call it a “sea scattering.”

 

Margaret’s Website

 

 

Posted on February 10, 2012 by caitlin
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  • Simon Ferrar

    I think someone ought to invent a Natural Burial site……

    • Orderofthegooddeath

      There are natural burial cemeteries, but nowhere near enough of them.  It would be great to have one that specialized in planting trees over actual whole bodies, so that you knew each tree was a body/person.

      • Pia

        I think that is my ONLY problem with natural burial – that you should only be using plants native to the area. I’ve had fantasies about a huge cherry tomato plant being planted over me for years now, but i do understand that for it to function as a self sustaining ecosphere the plants need to be in harmony with the established site. A eucalyptus tree doesn’t sound too bad however. J

  • Simon Ferrar
  • Anonymous

    I don’t see why you couldn’t use a different plant if you had to be all whiny about her initial choice. A rosebush, maybe?

    But really, people, think outside the boxwood.

    *runs*

  • http://www.markoneill.org Mark O’Neill

     So what did you do about the uncle?  Obviously you didn’t flush him down the toilet (I hope!). What did you say to the guy?

  • Lindsay

    How would one go about establishing a natural burial site? My parents own a fair amount of land and a perpetual debate about which local cemetery they would like to be planted in when they leave this mortal earth, but I don’t think either of them will be terribly pleased. But if we could literally take them out to the woods behind the house and plunk them down under an oak tree I think they could live with that. How would someone even start that process? Or, alternatively, how would I even bring the idea up to them?

    • http://www.piainterlandi.com/ Pia Interlandi

      Hi Lindsay, where are you located? You don’t need to establish a natural burial site to bury your parents on their land, you just need a decent lawyer. But in saying that I am all for people starting NB sites. Ken West did a great book recently call ‘A Guide to Natural Burial’ – which is a pretty good guide to establishing a site. Robert Larkins has a decent section in ‘Australian Funeral Rights’ about burying on your own property.

  • Pia

    The PoeTree is lovely, but just another fancy way of doing stuff with ashes… We need more solutions for the burial and transformation of the body, as it can do all of the growth into trees naturally, without the need for cremation….