To mow or not to mow...?

[NickB]

No worries Guy. Always have time to hear your interesting tales.

Besides, you bring us to the issue: Cemeteries - the different feelings they elicit from people.

Ultimately, though, like George, our names are just memories associated with the place we are finally laid to rest, a cemetery or grave yard, or where our ashes are scattered.
So far as I am concerned, all the things living in a consecrated piece of ground such as a cemetery or graveyard, should be treated with as much, if not more, respect; they, after all, still posses that precious spark we call life......
N

[Julian]

A couple of years ago I visited my relatives graves in a small churchyard at Bransgore in Dorset. It was covered in wildflowers and was a really pretty picture, and I think it a fitting tribute to the memories of departed souls. Unfortunately my aunt was there strimming them all! She was really cross about the way it had 'got out of control'. So the orchids and oxeyes were replaced with cut roses etc.... I guess it's different strokes for different folks but there is a vogue now for green burials and that is really good since these places can be real Gardens of Eden and little paradises in our midst. They serve a reminder of our own place in eternity or the big scheme of things, whatever your phillosophy on life. Grave stones don't last for ever either as evidenced by some of the earlier thread in the OP, so a few years back, my brother in law's Jonathan's ashes were buried in a wild patch and a local provenance Pedunculate Oak planted on top. The tree is now 20 ft high and stands beside a veteran tree which is also a bat roost but slowly falling down (if that's possible). We are all hoping that the new tree will last another 500 years or so and service both man and beast and eventually when the old one goes, replace it. No need for a stone

[NickB]

I think too we must view these places in the context of the times - with wildlife habitat under pressure elsewhere, these areas should become little reserves in their own right. And they will become more important as the "countryside" continues to disappear. When your aunt was a young girl, we still had a countryside, that had not fallen prey to the agri-chemical blitz that we saw in the late 1950's and 1960's, and also 3 times as many butterflies and small birds for instance, as we do now, where the countryside is a series of mono-cultures, with little room for wildlife.
So it was more appropriate to keep the graveyards tidy - they had not become the wildlife havens they are now and there was space for wildlife elsewhere
But, as we are where we are now, it is more appropriate to manage for those creatures and plants that have no where else left to go, surely...?