Blaise Pascal was certain: “Paradise was lost in a garden, it will be found again in a garden.” The French philosopher, mathematician and mystic was certainly not thinking of a “cottage garden” like today in the cemetery in Cologne-Esch or one “Wild flower garden” as in the Ohlsdorfer Friedhof in Hamburg. Not to mention an ecological model garden like the one in Frankfurt’s main cemetery, where more and more space is becoming available due to the new culture of urns.
In his time, in the 17th century, the dead were still buried in enclosed churchyards – a “cemetery” in other words – because they were supposed to be close to the bones of the saints in the reliquary shrines. How it was done there is documented in the High Prince Paderborn Church Order: “So that the graves of the dead are not undermined or trampled on in the churchyards, the Pastoribus as sextons should not let their cattle, cows, horses, sheep, pigs or geese approach them bring, be admitted.”
Weeds between the stones
The burial culture in Pascal’s time oscillated between the medieval dance of death and the Reformation’s fear of relics. The fear of the vapors of the plague corpses left no room for the feelings of the survivors, no room for blooming funeral gardens on the mass graves in front of the city walls. Even the highest dignitaries have always been bedded under stone pyramids or have crouched richly decorated under burial mounds.
The early Christians waited in the Roman catacombs for the resurrection of the flesh on Judgment Day. Freund Hein leads into the realm of the mineral. After all, a kind hand once laid a bouquet of flowers on the golden mummy coffin of the child pharaoh Tutankhamun in 1323 BC, which was discovered exactly one hundred years ago under rubble and rubble. Gravel and stones on graves are popular with the bereaved again today because they consider it easier to care for than a planted grave – a mistake, as cemetery gardeners who pluck out the weeds between the stones know.
Comforting flowers and trees
Flowers conjure up the living, plants turn a graveyard into a living space. Is that allowed or irreverent? In any case, park cemeteries have only existed since the 19th century. The enlightened Emperor Joseph II had already enacted reform laws in 1782, Prussian state law followed suit in 1794, and in 1804 Napoleon announced a reform decree that radically changed burial culture. Secularization spread to the cemeteries, which were deprived of clergy and fees. The municipalities should watch over hygiene, because more and more residents are leaving more and more dead in the cities. From then on they were buried in row graves in central cemeteries on the outskirts of the city.
The mourners had to put up with a long journey. But flowers and trees were supposed to comfort and lift them up again – an idea from the extensive North American colonies that had already inspired European garden theorists in the sensitive 18th century. The botanist Ferdinand Franz Wallraf planned the Melatenfriedhof in Cologne on the site of a medieval leper asylum as a public green area for recreation. In 1810 it was inaugurated by the cathedral priest.
In the meantime, the growing cities have overgrown their outsourced central cemeteries again. To this day, these are similar to English gardens in this country, while stone still dominates in southern Europe. Stone monuments were also afforded to the upper bourgeoisie of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Pompous mausoleums, downright clan tombs, replaced the sacred character of the cemetery in favor of social self-portrayal including monument protection. The graves of ordinary citizens, on the other hand, mutated into miniature gardens, almost like the ancient Adonis gardens, which in pots and shards reminded of the hero of the vegetable die and become of the same name – of death as a condition of life.
Turn necropolis into biotopes
And the professionals in the Central Horticultural Association have already taken care of it. Up and down the country, “Memory Gardens” have become fashionable since the 2009 Federal Horticultural Show, with eighty-six offered by the Association of German Cemetery Gardeners, for example in Berlin-Steglitz. Since 2008, the Cooperative of Cemetery Gardeners in Cologne has offered “funeral gardens” based on themed modules: floodplain and heath gardens, cottage gardens and rose gardens.
Under the label “Naturruh”, the Association of German Cemetery Gardeners even wants to transform the former necropolis into biotopes. At the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, the members of the cooperative are luring butterflies with a “butterfly garden”, but at Frankfurt’s main cemetery, forest board games have long been dizzying around trees and graves: butterflies or souls who have chosen Frankfurt’s most beautiful park as their paradise?
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