Upon visiting the cemetery today, I noticed a few plots nearby the one I was visiting had yellowed. The cemetery is all turf, with no distinctions between plots apart from the headstones, and the lawn looks to be in very good shape otherwise.
I would have not found this out of the ordinary in any way, except for the fact that the yellowed areas were in the shape and size of a coffin. This piqued my curiosity, but it was past closing time for the staff, and I really want to know why this has happened.
The graves themselves had nothing in common with each other, as my first thought was possibly they had been reopened recently to allow for extra caskets. But the dates of the last internments were all varied, the 3 I saw one was in the mid 80’s, one was in the 60’s, and the other was 1991. So there was no correlation there.
So if anyone out there has experience of this sort of thing, and wondered why this would happen, I would love to know, simply out of natural curiosity. To my way of thinking, there must be some sort of similarity between the 3 that I saw. maybe the same type of material in the casket or the lining is used, which causes some sort of leaching into the ground? Maybe the chemicals used in the funeral parlor? Im guessing here, but it would have to be something along those lines.
Anyone know? I have drawn a blank with a search of the net.
Just a guess: someone put coffins on the grass and left them there long enough for the grass to go yellow and start to die off. Cemetery worker’s joke, maybe? If so, I hope they were empty …
Is the yellow part the size of the coffin or is it the size of the burial plot? The plot will extend all the way to the headstone or marker. The coffin is only a few feet wide and not as long as the plot. Also, the coffins are many times placed in vaults so I can’t think of a reason that the grass outline would conform to the shape of a coffin.
It could be possible that the grass on the plots is a different kind than the grass in the adjoining areas. Some plots may have been seeded with a thicker grass (Zoysia comes to mind) to make the plot look like thick like a blanket. Different grasses fade under different conditions so the plot grass could still be yellow while the adjoining grass is green.
If you get an answer from the cemetary groundskeepers please let us know.
Were the plots adjacent to other plots that had just been dug. If so, they might have piled the dirt on top of those that have the dead grass. Or the vault for the new grave may have been resting on top of those other plots.
It’s almost assuredly not the fault of the casket or the embalming fluids. Any reputable funeral home and cemetery will place the body in a casket that is sealed well and that gets placed inside a big concrete vault as well.
Also the word you are looking for is interment, not internment. The former gets you placed in the ground, the latter gets you moved to a different location within your own country for military purposes (ostensibly).
The groundskeeper at the local cemetery, Joe Krepnik, has developed an ingenious method to keep a freshly dug grave from settling around the edges. He lays 6’ planks of 2x4 lengthwise across the plot, about 6 inches below the surface, fills it with dirt and fertilizer, then replaces the sod. It seems to give the whole cemetery a neater, flatter look, but because of the time and expense involved, the rest of the groundskeeping staff has not adopted this method. As a result, the grass is always greener over the Krepnik planks.
I spent a few summers doing maintenance at a cemetery and I dug a few graves.
In my experience, a few things can cause the yellowing.
When you dig the plot, you cut rectangles of sod. We would stack some of the sod on top of each other. The sod on top may sit in the sun for a day or two, turning yellow while that underneath stays fine. So in our cemetery some of the plots were greener on one side.
Our cemetery was originally sort of a “dip” that was filled to level it out many years ago. The fill was mostly sandy, with some good soil near the top. When you dig the hole, you need to get rid of a good portion of dirt (to make up for the volume of the vault and coffin). If you remove the dirt that’s on the top (usually the easiest way to do it), you’re removing the best soil. Then when you fill the hole in, you’re left with the sandy fill that was underneath the topsoil and it’s not as good for the grass.
Some people will bring in their own soil for their family’s plot and plant their own grass. If certain plots are much greener than the rest, this is probably the case.
Note: The cemetery I worked for wasn’t exactly “rich” so big city cemeteries may do some things differently regarding the soil.
