Green Burial Grave Marker
Green Burial Grave Marker:
This was commissioned by a lady to mark her husbands green burial resting place.
If you not familiar with green or natural burials, they are a very environmentally friendly and a greener alliterative to a conventional church burial. Coffins are made of biodegradable cardboard, papier maché or wicker caskets and the graveyard is more a nature reserve or picnic site, amongst the tree, wild flowers, birds, bees and wildlife.
Another thing about Green burials is there is no headstone, some people choose to plant a tree or have a wooden plaque made, its all about keeping the grave site as natural as possible.
This was one of the slowest made and carefully undertaken projects I have ever produced.
The whole thing is handcrafted from true English Oak, the Waney edge is left on to add to the natural feel of the whole green burial feel, and is mounted on 10cm thick posts or legs. Even thought it looks quite tall, 12 inches of the legs are going into the ground, this is just lent against a tree for our images, but you get the idea.
We were given the wording to carve, which is as seen, however, we were also asked to carve a motif to give the wooden burial plaque some extra detail. As the gentleman was a wood carver the lady wanted an oak leaf and acorns as a tribute.
We set to work, looking at images on google, going over our drawings and previous acorn carvings we had already done in the past. We wanted this to be really good!!
The legs are not just bolted to the plaque either, we carved out a section of the legs so the plaque actuarially sits within the legs, making this very stable. The bolt holes are also covered by oak plugs.