Brian Culp is talking about a Toronto cemetery because he is, after all, in the business of burying bodies.

“The Massey is like a castle with a Greek goddess on top,” he says, referring to a crypt in the city’s Mount Pleasant cemetery for members of the Massey family, the farm-manufacturing dynasty that also built Massey Hall.

“Stavro’s is beyond imagination,” says Culp of the memorial there to Steve Stavro, the late founder of Knob Hill Farms and former owner of the Toronto Maple Leafs. The tomb is adorned with bronze plaques, has lions on each corner and is topped with a statue of Alexander the Great riding his favourite horse, Bucephalus.

“The granite goes 30 feet in the air,” says the 70-year-old, relaying how a friend in the business says the stone alone cost $800,000.

Culp’s interest in history is evident as he talks, sitting in a restaurant in Jordan, Ont., just down the road from St. John’s public cemetery where he is superintendent.

It’s his love of history, he says, that pushed him into the cemetery business after careers as an alderman and a General Motors worker.

“I love history,” he says. “I majored in history at university.”

When asked for the connection, he says dryly, “All the people in history are dead.”

But it certainly does not mean Culp is stuck in the past.

St. John’s is one of a handful of cemeteries in the country with a dedicated section for natural burials, a fairly new trend here despite their increasing popularity in Britain and even the U.S.

Culp is sure natural burials are going to take off.

“Based on experience, I have no doubt for multiple reasons,” says Culp, who has run St. John’s since the mid-90s, “One is the green aspect. The other is cost. The other’s expedience.”

The first green burial in Britain took place in 1993. There are now 350 sites across the U.K. They have even become as popular as conventional burials in some parts of Britain where there are large numbers of natural burial areas, says Rosie Inman-Cook who manages the U.K.’s Association of Natural Burial Grounds.

She says people choose them because they have “a desire to become a tree or to be among nature.” Or, they “wish to make a minimal impact, leave a positive legacy and also have somewhere nicer for relatives to visit.”

Ontario’s first natural burial section opened in 2009 in Cobourg’s Union cemetery, in a meadow overlooking a creek.

A smattering of other cemeteries have followed suit. Fairview Cemetery in Niagara Falls is one, Parkview Cemetery in Waterloo another. Both are municipally run. St. John’s opened its green burial section in 2017. The Glenwood Cemetery in Picton, Canada’s first woodlot burial ground, has 35 graves in a heavily treed area.

All are considered hybrids because they are part of larger, conventional cemeteries.

The GTA has two sites — Duffin Meadows Cemetery in Pickering and Meadowvale Cemetery in Brampton — both owned by the Mount Pleasant Group.

In Ontario, all burials are regulated by the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, according to the provisions in the Funeral, Burial and Cremation Services Act. The act does not define a green burial.

Organizations such as the Green Burial Society of Canada — which promotes natural burials and is pushing for provincial laws to change so certain graves can be reused — recommends introducing protocols similar to those in the U.K.

They include burying a body in a shroud, casket or container made of biodegradable material, usually in an unmarked grave, though that varies depending on the cemetery. Some cemeteries use natural stone markers while others record the names of the buried on a communal marker.

The practice of lining the grave with concrete — historically used to protect the casket and reduce the amount of earth settling after burial — is discouraged. And although embalming is a no-no, funeral visitations are still possible if the body can be refrigerated.

These new protocols make green burials cheaper than conventional ones.

Families in Ontario are also entitled to arrange a funeral with the help of the cemetery, thereby eliminating the cost of a funeral director, although transportation of the body has to be arranged privately because cemeteries aren’t licensed to do that.

Mark Richardson, who manages Fairview in Niagara Falls, says the industry was reluctant at first to embrace green burials out of fear they would disrupt the conventional business. But Richardson, who holds information sessions for cemetery managers, funeral directors and community groups, says the industry is coming around.

“Now we’re seeing funeral homes that are inviting us into their communities to talk about green burials because they’re realizing this is of interest,” says Richardson. “Families want this option.”

Cremation is still the more popular option by far. About 70 per cent of Ontarians are cremated, and many urns never even make it to a cemetery. They’re left in closets or not picked up by the family.

“People are disconnected with death and dying, and they don’t know what to do with it,” says Richardson. “We are no longer involved in the act of dying, and we’ve kind of separated ourselves from that.”

The process also creates a “significant carbon footprint,” although advocates of natural burials aren’t necessarily arguing which is worse — cremation or conventional burial.

“Restoring the land to its natural state is the really important piece,” Richardson says.

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The two-acre natural burial ground at Fairview has attracted more birds to the cemetery, including the endangered Bank Swallow, he said.

And many natural burial grounds accept cremated remains.

“We respect the fact that many folk have a fear of burial and want to be cremated,” says Inman-Cook. “These families then have the option to purchase a plot at a natural burial ground and inter the ashes under a tree,” she says.

In the U.S., the Foxfield Preserve operates as a stand-alone nature preserve cemetery, and the land is maintained as forest and prairie.

Washington State has taken things even further, passing a law that allows human composting in a contained environment by May 2020. A company there is creating a site in Seattle that will compost human remains in 30 days and donate leftover soil, not taken by family members, to Puget Sound conservation land.

Canada’s only stand-alone nature preserve cemetery is the Denman Island Natural Burial Cemetery off Vancouver Island, but it is small and serves only current or past residents of the island and their descendants. The Natural Burial Association in Ontario is advocating for a similar stand-alone conservation burial ground here.

“We don’t need to develop vast open space for cemeteries,” says Richardson. “We can look at woodlots or conservation areas.”

The natural burial area in St. John’s cemetery in Jordan is on a flat stretch of land bordered by a farmer’s field. It’s set apart from the original cemetery, adjacent to St. John’s Anglican Church, built in 1842. The church is Anglican, but the cemetery is public and anyone can be buried there.

Culp took the job more than 20 years ago, after Steve Witcher, then the Anglican priest, asked him to come on board.

Culp tells a funny story about how the former Anglican Bishop Walter Asbil asked Witcher if he had saved all the souls in Jordan, to which Steve replied, ‘No,’ according to Culp.

“The bishop said, ‘Good, I don’t want you unemployed.’”

The land was donated by George Ball, a United Empire Loyalist, whose roots in the area date back to around the same time as Culp’s family.

Culp recently sold the family farm, a cobblestone farmhouse as picturesque, he says, as a scene by Currier and Ives, the 19th-century printers who created hand-painted lithographs of American homesteads.

A walk through the cemetery with Culp and the church’s current minister, Pam Guyett, reveals a site that’s mostly lawn, with graves marked by small wooden stakes to be replaced later by flat markers. The natural burial area is about a half-acre with room for 115 lots, or graves, one on top of the other.

A large mound of dirt covers a recent grave and Culp says the soil will eventually settle on its own. A small no-trespassing sign marks one of the area’s outer borders. A soybean field runs along another side, and in the distance, a rooster crows.

At St. John’s, bodies are buried within three days of death because there is no embalming. The deceased is buried in a biodegradable coffin or even just a shroud. The family can lower the body using biodegradable straps that are then thrown into the grave, and they can have a hand in shovelling the earth on top.

“There’s no monument, no chemicals, no metal, no varnish,” says Culp.

One of the first graves dug in the natural section was the typical three-by-eight-foot hole, but Guyett quickly realized it would be too big for a body in a shroud, not encased in a coffin.

“The next one I went out and said, ‘You need to make it smaller, so the pallbearers don’t fall in.’ ”

So far, only five people are buried in the section, but 12 lots have been sold.

Culp knows 12 sales is not a lot. “But you have to remember that every cemetery in Ontario started with one burial, including the mighty Mount Pleasant,” he says.

“It started with one, and away you go from there.”