The Birth of a Natural Cemetery

In the hills on the far side of their barns and fields, Catherine and her partner, Gavin, preside over Salt Spring Island Natural Cemetery, a lush expanse of maples and firs blanketed with ferns and Oregon grape. Headstones of varying sizes, untouched except for the artfully sandblasted names and dates, mark a series of gentle mounds. Nearby, a stream trickles over a bed of stones, providing a steady rhythm under the symphony of birdsong. In the distance, clucking chickens chime in from the couple’s adjacent farm.

Vibrant, wild, and welcoming, the landscape bears little resemblance to a conventional cemetery. No manicured lawn, no slabs of cement, no sateen bouquets. Only natural materials are welcome in this green public burial site, the first of its kind in Canada. Here, there is no embalming and no silk-lined casket to preserve and protect the deceased from nature’s reclamation. The intent is the opposite: to provide a simple, natural return to the earth.

The combination of a farm and a cemetery might seem odd at first. But the cycles of life and death are already experienced acutely on farms. For every beginning, every sowing of a seed, every harvest of fruit, there comes an end.

It was Gavin’s desire to be buried on his own land that ignited the idea. At first, just a fanciful thought, brought up in jest. But brilliant ideas conveyed as absurdities can be persistent, and this one resurfaced until Catherine and Gavin could see it clearly for what it was: the missing piece of their puzzle. “I think people should be able to make a living farming,” Catherine says, “yet at the same time, I think that food should be affordable. It’s a real contradiction and it’s tricky.”

Diversifying into the cemetery business was a way to ease the financial pressures that come with ethical farming. It offered an avenue for Catherine to pursue sacred work, something she’d felt a longing for since stepping away from teaching yoga. But it also came with another remarkable benefit—the potential to create an old-growth forest of towering coastal firs.

The cemetery site was logged about a century ago, and, without some sort of covenant, the forested area of their property was unprotected from future development. Their century-old Douglas firs would be at risk of eventually being harvested. “Bodies in the ground is the best kind of covenant there is!” Catherine says excitedly. “Protecting and nourishing these trees is what makes this burial ground unique and beautiful. We don’t go right up close to the trees, so we don’t disturb the roots. But their roots will come and find the bodies. They will feed the trees.”

“It’s a lot different than growing food. It’s a lot different than plants that you grow and harvest. The trees were here before I was, and they’ll be here after me.

"I’m not at all the grower or the master, I am much more of a servant.”

Her role as servant to these trees began not in the forest, but in navigating layers of bureaucracy. “Twenty years ago there was legislation that everyone had to be in a grave liner, vaults, and all of this,” says Catherine. She credits the work of advocacy groups like The Green Burial Society of Canada and Natural Burial Association for making it possible to offer ecologically sustainable burials. But it took nearly two years and countless phone calls, forms, and emails to be licensed as a provincial Place of Interment, and to secure a provincial Certificate of Public Interest to protect the land.

The first to be welcomed into the soil “was an elder and a real character,” says Catherine. “His friends dug the grave and we kept saying ’It’s gotta be deeper!’ They dug and sweat and kept taking turns. It was really a chore and a process.” Following the interment, the crew of four raised a glass for their friend around a fire and they each exclaimed gratitude for the experience. “It meant so much to them: the digging. It was so cathartic.”

Catherine’s search for truth in her 20s led her to earn a degree in philosophy at Simon Fraser University. “Philosophy is what holds everything else. It is the crux of everything, the deepest of everything,” she says. Asking the essential questions led her to yoga practice and then to Salt Spring Island to live a quiet, contemplative life close to the earth.

Her glowing presence, her education, and her decades of yoga teaching make her well suited to leading memorial ceremonies, but Catherine found herself being drawn to a more enduring calling of service. “It became very clear to me about my role really being for the land and for the forest. Knowing each of the trees more and more over the years has all been very beautiful. And really feeling that I am the servant to this part of the land quite directly. When there’s a funeral service, I am there, but I stand back, and I feel a little bit like a rock or a big tree, like I hold the space for it.”

The journey has unearthed many surprises. “I didn’t know how much I loved rocks. I mean I’ve always kind of liked rocks, you know, you’re at the beach and you pick up rocks. But I suddenly had so many rocks in my life. I’ve always been a spiritual person and a grounded person, and I like that. I kind of cultivate both. But I have become very into the rocks,” she says, erupting into gleeful laughter. “Just making the fire pit and choosing the rocks that would be the headstones, and then finding so many rocks back there and the beauty.”