On the first day of spring last weekend, several of us Georgia Botanical Society members went looking for early spring wildflowers in what is undoubtedly Georgia’s most unusual cemetery — a “green” burial tract on the grounds of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit near Conyers.
In the Honey Creek Woodlands, as the monastery’s cemetery is known, a deceased person is simply wrapped in a sheet or placed in a plain, biodegrable coffin of wood or cardboard, then interred about 4 feet deep in the ground. No formaldehyde or other embalming fluids are used in the body and no granite slab marks the grave. Instead, it’s covered with light pine needle mulch and native wildflower seed.
Buried there without concrete vault or the other trappings of traditional interments, the remains ultimately become part of the soil. It is how the abbey’s Trappist monks, who own the monastery’s 2,100 acres, are buried when they die — in simple shrouds.
We were at the “conservation burial ground” at the invitation of a fellow botanical society member, the Rt. Rev. Francis Michael Stiteler, the monastery’s abbot. Although he has long been a society member, he had never been on one of its field trips. The monastery’s monks, he explained, are forbidden to leave the abbey.
Before we went looking for botanical delights in the natural cemetery, Father Stiteler, a self-taught naturalist, explained the concept behind the burial place. He said it is for people who want to be environmentally friendly when they die and at the same time conserve wild land and natural beauty.
“What we are offering is our land and the protection of that land,” he noted. It already is part of the Mount Arabia Heritage Area, an 8,000-acre greenway stretching along the South River from Mount Arabia Nature Preserve and Panola Mountain State Park in the northwest to the monastery in the southeast.
In essence, he said, the burial ground is like a nature preserve. Although it now is mostly a logged-over pine forest, it is slowly returning to a mixed hardwood forest like the one that originally covered the site. Eventually, the burial ground “will look like beautiful woods with a few gentle paths going through it,” the abbot said. More information: www.trappist.net.
On our wildflower walk there, we found several early bloomers — winter jasmine, field pansy, cudweed, green-and-gold, bluets (Houstonia pusilla), round-lobed hepatica and bloodroot. Flowering red maples cast a pinkish haze nearly everywhere. But in general, said our leader, botanist Jim Allison, blooms are “slow or behind schedule” this year, probably because of the unusually cold winter.
In the sky: The moon will be full on Monday night. The Cherokee people called March’s full moon the windy moon, says David Dundee, an astronomer with Tellus Northwest Georgia Science Museum. Brightly shining Venus is low in the west at dusk. Mars rises out of the east at sunset and is visible throughout the night. Jupiter appears low in the east just before sunrise. Saturn rises out of the east a few hours after sunset and will appear the moon Monday night.
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