The green burial site we've chosen is a lightly managed forest, without the litter of a traditional graveyard - no headstones, urns, monuments and what not. Just an eco friendly burial, with no embalming first, and optionally a small plaque made of local stone. Flowers are allowed, but they must be just a bunch of flowers without wire, foam, vase or plastic wrap. Wreaths are quietly removed a few days after a burial.

It just looks like a particularly nice bit of native forest, and in a hundred years they aim that it should still just look like forest. They allow and even encourage picnics, walkers, dog walkers.

Surprisingly - well we were - it isn't more expensive than a regular funeral.

Where is this?

You can google "green burial" or "natural burial" for your state. Here some locations in New Jersey: https://web.njsfda.org/public/decisions/ground-burial/green-...

Plant a new one? You can maintain a cemetery forest just like a regular one; the dead people aren't going to care, and so long as the forest maintenance is not completely neglected, why would the survivors complain either? It's not like regular tombstones don't erode away with time just like trees would.

I don't know about you, but for me even a fallen tree sounds like a more interesting tomb marker than a slab of stone.

It will not be chopped down. The idea is to plant a forest which is in some form of the word "sacred", a place that is respected, because it is nature reclaimed, or because it is a resting place of the dead. If a tree falls over (some live many hundreds of years), it will rot and take on its natural role in nature as food for fungus and other life. As people die, the forest grows. It shouldn't be maintained, the land should be considered spent, given back.

Forests and nature in general managed just fine without human intervention, and indeed, us valiantly putting out forest fires have only made forest fires more dangerous as forests are now denser than they'd have been with natural pruning.

At many graveyards you now lease a grave for a certain number of years, not in perpetuity. Not really much different to that. No idea what they do with the bodies once the lease is up...

Traditionally, the previous occupant is exhumed and their bones deposited in the ossuary building. I imagine a modern cemetery just quietly trashes the headstone when the lease expires, and re-leases the plot at full price, as though no one had already been buried there.

I'm not sure when the gravesite lease for ethical business practice expires.

Apparently in Greece they dig the bodies up after three years and put the bones in an ossuary.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34920068

You plant two trees, one for the deceased human and one for the dead tree.

... but but then what happens when that tree dies?

Naturally, you plant another tree.

You plant a human

The long term perspective is that the site remains as natural as possible. People who choose to be buried here probably aren't looking for an eternal monument to their existence, but instead are trying to leave this world with as little trace as possible.