Spooky Scary Skeleton, There's Flowers on His Grave

Have you ever wondered why some graves have what look to be large planters near or on them? Those planters/flower bed-like things are called cradle graves and they do have a purpose: cemetery gardens. The traditional cradle grave gardens have a headstone and a footstone connected by two walls to create a bathtub-like shape. There are some newer/non-traditional ones that are either shallow or look like a small, raised flower bed, but they serve the same purpose.

Cradle graves were typically filled with flowers, but there are no rules that said you couldn't have a small harvestable garden in it if you wanted to. Which, it wouldn't be weird if you chose to have harvestable plants as most herbs are not going to have roots deep enough to be near the body beneath the grave. So, there is no need to worry about facing a curse and/or feeling tainted for using "corpse rich" soil. At the peak of the use of cradle graves cemeteries were bright, colorful, and full of the scent and color of a variety of blooming flowers.

Cradle graves were popularized in the Victorian Era (roughly 1837-1901) and fairly common at the time because at the time, the culture was to take care of family, even after they had passed. That may seem a bit odd but remember things like penicillin did not exist until the mid 1900s, so if you got an infection, you were kind of out of luck if your body couldn't naturally fight it off. You were especially out of luck if you lived in an area that had a plague such as cholera, leprosy, the yellow fever, or really any type of flu. With the effectiveness of medicine at the time, death was more common than it is now. Hence, the culture at the time was to cherish the dead and a fair amount of time was spent by the deceased's family tending to the garden. It was also a time to reconnect with the dead and it was not uncommon to see families having a picnic at the cradle grave garden.

Cradle graves fell out of style for many reasons - culture changed, medicine got better (lower death rates), and families no longer had time nor felt the need to tend to graveyard gardens. What has become of the cradle graves now? Well, many have gone unattended but across the US and the UK there has been an effort to revive them via volunteer groups who are usually not related to those whose graves they are tending. Maybe in the future we will see a revival in cradle grave gardens if gardening comes back as a hobby once things have settled after COVID. Time will tell!

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