One of the conditions for natural burial is to use a biodegradable coffin/shroud made with natural materials. They give a range of possibilities including

Banana leaves, Bamboo, Willow, Hemp, Cotton, Jute, Reed, Coconut fibre

When Kinthissa was first living in London, she went looking for banana leaves as an essential ingredient of something that she wanted to cook. Very difficult to find! She searched high and low, until at last she found some potted banana plants in a theatrical props supply shop. She very politely explained that she would like to take one of the pots. They enquired, how long would she be needing it for. She blithely replied that the plan was to eat the contents. Their response I will leave to the reader's imagination, except to say that it lasted long in the memory of all concerned.

So anyway ... when we went to the funeral shop yesterday, I nearly chose banana leaf. However, there was no actual contest, I knew already that the answer had to be bamboo. She wrote of the comforting hollow sound that bamboo makes,

I am standing in the bamboos, looking out through them and down onto an open field in strong winter light. The wind stokes up fiercely every now and then, making the great high culms throw themselves about in sudden abandon. The green leaves have a wet sound, a whooshing, while the bone-coloured bamboo that have died knock drily against one another, a comforting hollow sound.

... So many sounds, so varied, wash over me. I open my eyes for a brief moment and gaze up at the tossing heads of bamboo, and am carried back to China, more than twenty years ago: I had lain in a bamboo grove where the dappled light had warmed me on a winter's day in the far southwest of Yunnan. Today, here in this singing valley in Lunigiana, the wind has a bite.

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