All Souls Cemetery

Taking place at mid-town Mountain View Cemetery, All Souls is billed as an opportunity for the public to remember its dead in what organizers call “a gentle atmosphere of contemplative beauty.”All Souls is part of the revival of the urban cemetery in an increasingly secular and multicultural Canada, says Richard Cook, a landscape architect with Vancouver-based LEES+Associates Landscape Architects and Planners.“Such events are opportunities for families to continue their dialogue with the deceased,” says Cook.They’re also examples of the changing burial-related demands of contemporary families.“They want more choice, more personalization, more input,” Cook says. “In response, cemeteries are working to make themselves more relevant to the communities in which they’re located.”Cemeteries are no longer part of the “waste disposal system,” he says. “They’re now sacred landscapes of memory. The new attitude is part of the trend of push-back against secularism.”Exemplifying the changing attitude to cemetery design is the new graveyard in Salmon Arm, B.C., for which LEES+Associates was lead consultant.The design includes many contemporary features, such as an outdoor celebration room with a memorial wall; scattering gardens (for cremated remains); cremation gardens with columbaria (vaults with niches for urns containing ashes); and a children’s garden.“The site plan incorporates traditional and new forms of interment, including cremation and memorialization,” says Cook. “It also allows for phased-in future development.”Cemeteries are having to reinvent themselves at a time when municipalities are running out of space.Unlike Mountain View, the Salmon Arm cemetery has a challenging location in a heavily forested area at the base of Mount Ida, several kilometres from the centre of town.A former firing range, the site is unfenced and is used by wildlife — bears, cougars and deer ...