Collaborating with scientist Joe Davis, the Japanese “art venture” Biopresence plans to create so-called “Transgenic Tombstones” by transfering human DNA into a tree's DNA, so that insdead of a cold slab of stone, the bereaved will be clutching and hugging trees in their moment of tear-drenched anguish.
Which leads me immediately to wonder a couple of things:
1) Might tomb cities be soon abandoned and succumb to the encroaching forest? Gone are the crypts and mausoleums and the neatly tended lawns, and in their places would be the botanically re-encoded dead.
2) And how will this forest be designed? Will Le Nôtre as a model reign supreme or will Capability Brown?