I started dreaming this one up one day after seeing a TV program about unusual funerals. I remember one guy who had insisted in his will that he be buried in his own back garden. Planted, he called it.

It set me thinking about grave stones and so forth. Generally, these things crumble after a couple of centuries while many species of tree live far longer. (Yew trees are believed to live for 2-9000 years!) As a memorial, which is pretty much the point of a funeral, trees may be far more practical, and have the advantage that they are alive. They grow. Life from death. And you can talk to trees more readily than you can to any hunk of rock. Trees, I believe, provide a far more meaningful link to dead relatives than headstone.

So, when I die, put me in the ground without a box and plant a ginkgo tree over me. If you can find one.

The problem is that if I get hit by a bus tomorrow my next of kin will be rushing around trying to buy not only a plot to put me in but also a healthy sapling. It's not really a feasible plan unless I start planning ahead - and maybe start growing my own funeral tree, just in case.

So I get this vision of me planting a new tree in a pot every year. When the oldest reaches a certain age it is sold to some organisation that plants trees and its place will be taken by the next oldest tree. If I should die I will then have a young healthy candidate for the post of 'earthly manifestation of my departed spirit' sitting right there in my garden. Great stuff.

But how the hell would I go about selling one tree a year? I can hardly set up a stall in the market, nor would it be easy to phone up some large organisation and persuade them to go to a lot of trouble on my behalf. There needs to be some kind of market, or organisation to coordinate this stuff.

So it's a popular movement of environmentally- and spiritually-minded people who are also going to share a need (eventually) for a space to lie down. The obvious thing to do would be to form some kind of organisation that would buy up areas of land specifically for the purpose of (again, eventually) planting a forest. The land would be divided up into single and family-sized plots in a 'memorial forest' which would benefit future generations for a very long time.

I have no idea what this would cost, but it's an attractive idea nonetheless. 

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