FEATURE: Evergreen ending 

Destination Destiny Memorials founder Ed Bixby may not have chosen to get into the natural burial business but his family’s centuries-old connection to cemeteries couldn’t be ignored. 

In 2007, the New Jersey real estate broker and developer tasked himself with cleaning up his ancestral Steelmantown Cemetery located amid the 25,000-acre nature preserve of Belleplain State Forest. 

The Bixbys owned the cemetery from the 1600s until the 1840s when they handed it over to the local community. While the family continued burying their loved ones there, the cemetery switched hands again in the 1950s—this time to a funeral director who performed the burial ceremony of Bixby’s infant brother but slacked off on taking care of the property.

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• PHOTO BY JAYSON MELLOM

“It always bothered my mother,” Bixby said. “I went to the individual and asked him to clean it up. He had a strange proposition. He said, ‘How about I give it to you?’”

By then, the cemetery had reverted to a forested state, serving as a covert spot for people to dump trash. It resulted in Bixby’s team clearing 10 dump truck loads of debris from the area. He added 3 miles of walking trails to entice people to visit that portion of remote New Jersey and learn about its history.

“We did it because I wanted to make my mother feel better about the fact that my brother was buried there,” he said.

Six months after he took over, Bixby read an article about natural burials and the Green Burial Council in the Atlantic City Press that sparked an evolution in his newfound responsibility as a cemetery owner. He contacted the council and found out that his cemetery met all the criteria to be a certified natural burial ground. 

Not long after, Bixby began offering off-trail burials to people in the New Jersey, New York, and Philadelphia area. His hands-on experience with natural burials moved him up the Green Burial Council ladder, eventually making him its president for a decade.

“Even though natural burial is a wonderful benefit to the environment, it’s truly a way for people to regain their place in the funeral service itself for their loved ones,” Bixby said.

Natural or eco-friendly burials offer catharsis. Opting to bury a loved one at one of the green burial sites managed by Bixby’s Destination Destiny Memorials means eschewing embalming chemicals, caskets, urns, or vaults in concrete or metals. Instead, the body is wrapped in a biodegradable cotton or linen shroud that allows for complete decomposition. It underscores the philosophy of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Bixby added. Family members have the option to participate in the ceremony by carrying their loved ones to the burial site, lowering their loved ones into the earth, and helping back fill the graves.

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• PHOTO BY JAYSON MELLOM

“Hollywood and movies have made cemeteries and funeral directors spooky,” Bixby said with a laugh. “What people have to understand is, it’s within our DNA to care for our loved ones in death.” 

Bixby’s management company, Destination Destiny Memorials, now also offers natural burial services in cemeteries in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Minnesota, Arizona, and in California—specifically, in Half Moon Bay, Placerville, and San Luis Obispo County’s Creston. According to Bixby, the opportunity to provide natural burials lies in reclaiming existing cemeteries that need restoration and preservation.

“It’s a conservation tool,” Bixby said. “I think you’re going to see conservation agencies and state agencies over time start using it for that because it can produce a certain degree of revenue that can go back into caring for the land. It preserves it for the community to use as a green space.”

Though he had a cemetery on his mind, Bixby arrived in California in 2016 with a commonly sought-after goal for many visitors: finding an idyllic location between Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

That pursuit propelled him to the Central Coast. 

One of Bixby’s business partners, Baxley Andresen, zeroed-in on the Creston Cemetery after a year-long search. They’re now co-owners of the 3-acre Little Farm Road cemetery and have overseen six green burials there since 2021. 

“There was only maybe about 80 people buried there,” he said. “Being surrounded by the ranchlands and vineyards, it’s absolutely beautiful.”

A small cemetery up on a hill, the Green Burial Council-certified Creston grounds remain somewhat a secret to locals about its capacity for natural burials, according to Bixby. Families in Santa Barbara County requested most of the natural burials conducted at the Creston Cemetery. 

“I think there are a lot of people who want it, and they don’t realize it’s in their own backyard,” he said. “A lot of the funeral professionals don’t understand what we do at the moment. … They’re not really pushing it, and I think what we need is the community to start asking for it.”

The Creston Cemetery enjoys the lack of general maintenance by Bixby’s team, meaning they allow grass and flowers to grow over the hand-dug graves marked with natural field stones. They only mow the vegetation down during fire season. Starkly different from a lawn cemetery, the Creston space looks similar to a meadow or a fallowed farm field, with trails cut into it for easy access.

“Up in Creston, it’s like a time warp,” Bixby said. “We’ve installed a split-rail fence, and I made an old-fashioned cowboy type sign that goes over the gate. The cemetery was founded in 1881. When you go to Creston, it feels like it’s 1881.”

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• PHOTO COURTESY OF DESTINATION DESTINY MEMORIALS

A natural burial service at Creston costs a flat rate of $5,000. That includes the single-burial plot for $3,500, and grave openings and closings for $1,500. Destination Destiny Memorials digs the graves by hand, uses rustic planks and hemp ropes to lower the shrouded body, and offers historic field stones to mark the plot.

Bixby has plans to expand the acreage of the Creston Cemetery, but his vision doesn’t stop there. Once the president of the Green Burial Council, he progressed to creating a group of his own called the Global Green Burial Alliance. It’s a social networking organization that connects natural burial enthusiasts across the world. 

He credits the worldwide effort for making natural burials a thriving space for acceptance. Everybody relates to the concept of death.

“Natural burial knows no boundaries when it comes to race, religion, and sexuality,” Bixby said. “I’ve buried Catholics next to Christians next to Muslims next to Jewish people. No one objects to it in death because the surroundings and the effects of what we’re doing transcends that.”