I will admit that I did not notice what I now find compelling about this particular monument myself. This photo is from the trip to Spring Grove that I took with my partner and a good friend the first weekend of December. It was the friend who noticed that the names of the family members, rather than being on separate little head- or footstones, were carved into the tree at the base, almost as if they were going down into the ground like roots.
It turns on its head the way that we usually think about roots and ancestry – a visual representation of that would involve the oldest generation of ancestors being down near the bottom and each successive generations’ names carved higher into the trunk and branches. This is certainly a different kind of family tree.
A Grave Concern 