Quebec cemetery turns former golf course into forest for the deceased

A new Quebec cemetery in Ste-Sophie has gravestones or plaques. Instead, people locate burial sites with the help of a cellphone app.

At a new ecological cemetery north of Montreal there are no gravestones or plaques. Instead, people locate burial sites with the help of a cellphone app.

Cemetery Forêt de la Seconde Vie opened in Ste-Sophie, Que., on Aug. 7 with the goal of transforming a 232,000-square-metre ex-golf course into a dense forest. It plants trees along the former fairways and greens to mark the burial sites of cremated remains, a process it calls “planting roots.”

Visitors can use the cemetery’s application to find their loved one’s tree. Once there, they’re asked to scan the surrounding landscape with their cellphone camera until a virtual chest pops up on screen, revealing digital memorabilia within: photos, videos and even recipes belonging to the deceased.

The cemetery claims to be the first in North America to be an official forest producer, a certification that in Quebec involves consulting a registered forest engineer to develop a land management plan.

For Mylene Hebert, 27, the concept was a welcome alternative to a traditional burial for her father, a longtime resident of Ste-Sophie who died in 2021 at the age of 55. She rejected the idea of a graveyard interment, which she called “gloomy” and “negative,” and she said she was immediately drawn to Forêt de la Seconde Vie when she heard about it. She plans to plant his tree on Oct 1.

“I think it’s incredible,” she said in a phone interview. “With paper photos, we can lose them,” but with the cemetery app, “they will be recorded when we go visit … I can’t wait to see how it’s going to look in 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.”

In 2019, co-founders Ritchie Deraiche and Guillaume Marcoux bought the property that would become Forêt de la Seconde Vie. Both fathers of young children, they said they came up with the idea while reflecting on how to combine environmental stewardship with family legacy.

“We wondered what concrete difference we could actually make right now in terms of preserving the environment, preserving and creating an ecosystem, biodiversity, and then, what we can leave to the generations that follow us,” Marcoux said in a recent interview.