The Vegetal Setting of Death/Cemetery Club

The reading on use of vegetation for funeray work was interesting to me because I used to work as a floral designer and of course the bread and butter of the floral industry is funerals. Weddings are big too but florist shops do not make as much money on weddings as a good funeral because the types of flowers used for weddiing work are far more expensive than usually the types used for funerals. As in the article "trees and shrubs" become dedicated to death and in floral work branches and copious amounts of foliage branches are a cornerstone of any arrangement. Also, dish gardens (which are a small basket with three or more small plants inside) are popular for memorials that can be kept growing in memorium. I can tell you that chrysanthemums and roses are still tremendously popular and offer a great variety of color as well as the symbolism of love and rememberence. It's no wonder that horticulture is heavily used in representation for death and rememberence since Romantic and Classical landscape architecture used design and particular plant choices to symbolically market themselves and to evoke strong feelings in visitors, even Olmsted picked and chose what he wanted to create feelings and mood in his designs.
The movie The Cemetery Club actually inspired me to be more creative with my Arlington project design. I was searching for a concept that would embody an appropriate useage for a sacred place and the process by which the residents around the cemetery would come together on top of that space to talk and interact, to "gestalt", provided a simple model of use I could inspirationally gleen from. The process of facing death is also interestingly explored in the movie as the participants have lost longtime companions and are in that phase of life where death is a more likely scenerio and inevitable horizen. I thought the movie was gently provocative.