Maple trees are famous for the gaudy show they put on each fall as their leaves change color. But they put on a spring show, too, as you may have noticed lately. In their anxiety to propagate, maples have evolved a stunningly efficient method of seed distribution. Winged pairs of seeds are released en masse to spin rapidly to the ground like squadrons of tiny helicopters. Even more impressively, the winged packets are designed to land seed-first, thus giving the seeds the best chance of taking root. Stroll through a maple grove this time of year, and you can't miss the thousands of dried seed cases standing upright in the grass as if there were simply no room for them to lie down.
Perhaps that's why the image sprang to mind last week when plans were announced for a new Australian cemetery in which corpses will be buried vertically in body bags, rather than horizontally in coffins. One could not help imagining all those bodies standing to attention in the crowded earth like so many maple-seed cases standing shoulder to shoulder in the grass at Shinjuku Gyoen.
Incongruous, you say? Doesn't one image suggest warmth and life and renewal while the other evokes cold earth, death and decay? Things trying to be born rather than things that have died? Yes, but that's not the whole story. It disregards the positively sunny attitude taken by the people at Palacom, the company that is planning the new cemetery at Darlington, Victoria, about 200 km southwest of Melbourne. It turns out their whole focus is on life and renewal and moving on. Not for the unfortunate souls who are to be interred on their land, naturally -- this is no cryogenics-like exercise in wishful thinking -- but for the land itself and, to a certain extent, for the bereaved.