Phil Carpenter doesn’t believe Fort Collins is doing anything new by setting aside a 1-acre piece of the city cemetery for people to be laid to rest without benefit of a vault or embalming.
Heck, he says, this “green” burial movement is really about revisiting America’s frontier days. “We’re basically going back to the 1860s,” said Carpenter, the city’s supervisor of cemeteries.
“Back then, when you wanted to bury Grandma, you wrapped her up in a quilt and put her in the ground,” he said.
Still, Carpenter is proud Fort Collins is pioneering green burials on the Front Range.
The City Council on Tuesday voted unanimously to allow a portion of Roselawn Cemetery to accept bodies that would not be embalmed and placed only in a shroud or biodegradable casket.
The area will be called the Garden of Harmony and will get little tending. It will be watered for only the first year of operation and reseeded in native grasses and wildflowers. “It will be very simple,” Carpenter said.
Fort Collins is leading the way in green burials, at least on the Front Range, said Karen van Vuuren, executive director of the Boulder nonprofit Natural Transitions.
Her group encourages more home and green funerals. Some communities on the plains and in Colorado’s mountains certainly do their version of green burials. Colorado Springs is also pushing for its own green cemetery, van Vuuren said. And there are a number of green memorial parks, where people can scatter, bury or store the ashes of their loved ones.
But what Fort Collins is doing is “unique, very unique,” she said.
“It will be wonderful if we can now refer someone to somewhere on the Front Range where they do green burials,” she said.
The grave sites at Roselawn will be 6 feet wide to allow more room for adjacent graves, Carpenter said. The plots will be marked by small granite memorials, which last longer than other traditional markers, such as sandstone.
No floral vases or plantings of any kind will be allowed, said the city.
The city opted for the 27-acre Roselawn for the all-natural cemetery because it still has about 14 acres available for development, Carpenter said.
The City Council still has to set prices for the green grave sites.
“I suspect we’ll have plenty of interest in this,” Carpenter said. “We’ve already had plenty of people ask about it.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
