No forest for a cemetery

The cemetery, a forest in which you can be buried, will not come to anything at first.

The municipality of Putzbrunn lacks the area.

And none of the forest owners want to sell.

Putzbrunn

- In October the GPP parliamentary group applied for a so-called "cemetery" at the Putzbrunn forest cemetery.

The administration examined the request and came to the conclusion that the municipality would have to buy an additional piece of forest for this.

The problem: So far, no forest owner has been willing to sell an area.

The community currently offers single and double graves for burial and urn burials with beds or name plates as well as urn compartments in a stele or in an urn wall, explained branch manager Michael Hohberg in the building committee.

Furthermore, there is the possibility of anonymous graves for burials, semi-anonymous urn graves with number plates and anonymous urn graves under trees.

A distinction should be made between the tree burial at the forest cemetery, which is already offered, and the funeral forest applied for.

"When buried in the forest, the biodegradable urn is buried directly in the tree root area, at a distance of two to three meters from the tree trunk," added Hohberg.

Community has an area, but it has no trees

From the point of view of the administration, several variants are conceivable in a funeral forest: The ashes of various deceased are buried on a community or base tree, the participants have no influence on exactly where they are buried.

"A family tree would be reserved for several urns, the ashes of only one or two people are buried on the single or partner tree." A tree under which children or "star children", i.e. stillbirths, are buried is also conceivable.

In general, according to Hohberg, grave care by relatives is omitted at burial in the funeral forest, planting and the placing of candles are not permitted.

To the west of the forest cemetery up to the exercise course, the community has an area of ​​around 3000 square meters.

Only there is no tree.

And: "If we were to reforest and use it as a cemetery, we would over-plan the planned expansion area for the cemetery," said Mayor Edwin Klostermeier (SPD).

If the municipality acquires a corresponding piece of forest, which no forest owner is currently willing to do, it would have to be dedicated as a funeral forest and entered in the land register.

"Without an offer from the forest owners, we cannot offer that"

Applicant Robert Böck (GPP) considers the area west of the cemetery to be well suited.

“We shouldn't buy or lease a piece of forest for this purpose.” Maria Feiner (CSU) contradicted this: “We have reserved this area for something else for a long time, we should talk to the forest owners again.” Doris Böhm (Greens) thinks a cemetery is nice, “but the anonymous urn graves are very similar.

We cannot offer this without an offer from the forest owners. ”Hohberg added that the Bavarian burial law is strict,“ there is still a lot of space for anonymous urn graves, even if the trend towards urn graves continues ”.

Currently the share is already over 50 percent of all burials.

The building committee decided unanimously not to offer a funeral forest for the time being and to contact the surrounding forest owners again.

More news from Putzbrunn and the Munich district can be found here.