by Janet Hurley   .   photo by Naomi Johnson

When we wrote about Carol Motley, Kim Zorn and Caroline Yongue in our September/October issue last year, the three Ashevilleans, who call themselves the “Green Reapers,” were just getting their eco-friendly businesses off the ground. (Or in some cases, in the ground.) Now, they’re really on a roll. Carol Motley and Lauri Newman opened a joint storefront—essentially a hip, friendly, plant-filled funeral parlor—on Haywood Road in West Asheville last November. Motley, of Bury Me Naturally, and Newman, of the landscaping company Farm Girl, sell local native plants and natural burial products, including eco-friendly pine caskets made by Kim Zorn of the Green Casket company and an organic burial shroud designed by Brooke Priddy of Asheville’s Ship to Shore.

Zorn, meanwhile, has teamed up with Charlotte funeral director Terrence Robertson to offer a complete green burial package, including casket, anywhere in North Carolina for $3,000 or less. She plans to collaborate with funeral directors across the state.

Yongue, a Buddhist minister who runs the Center for End of Life Transitions in Montford, has stepped up her class offerings with at least one end-of-life documentation class a month and more home funeral classes in 2010. She’s training more “doulas for the dying” and will work with a group to create an intentional community in Buncombe County with a built-in “transition center” for births and deaths.

Through early spring, Motley and Newman’s West Asheville shop (just down the block from Short Street Cakes) will host gatherings about a variety of death-related topics. Asheville attorney Leslie Stevens will talk about end-of-life legal decisions. Newman will discuss gravesite plantings. They’ll have a licensed funeral director on hand at every meeting. “We should have some great conversations,” Motley says. “Death is the one subject that brings us all together—whether we like it or not.”