The seeds for the Garden of Artful Remembrance began with a chance encounter in Spring 2020, when Heritage Gardens first met Dan Bellan—a master of commemorative art with over 30 years of experience. Working with locally sourced marble, granite, and basalt, and incorporating bronze sculpted in Europe and cast in Germany, Dan’s custom, deeply personal work stood out from the template-based designs commonly found in most cemeteries. The family monument he installed on our grounds captured our imagination and affirmed our desire to reimagine cemetery art as something more meaningful and creative.
At the time, most families were choosing pre-designed monuments from standard catalogs, often made overseas, resulting in long wait times and repetitive designs that didn’t reflect the individuality of those buried. We realized that to preserve the long-term aesthetic and emotional tone of our cemetery, we needed to become more intentional in how monuments were designed and integrated into our landscape.
When Dan’s East Vancouver workshop was forced to close in 2021 due to rezoning, we invited him to relocate his practice to our grounds. This collaboration gave us the opportunity to learn directly from a master craftsman and instil art-making into the heart of our cemetery.
Through Dan, we were introduced to Strassacker, a world-renowned bronze foundry in Germany, and were invited to visit Campus Vivorum—an experimental cemetery design project focused on grief healing and transformation. Their research inspired us deeply. Rather than treating mourning as a passive, isolated experience, Campus Vivorum offers an intentional design approach that invites people into spaces where grief can be transformed into remembrance—through freedom of choice, artistic expression, and therapeutic landscape design.
This vision laid the foundation for our Garden of Artful Remembrance—a space within Heritage Gardens that blends sculptural artistry, nature, and psychological insight. Designed in partnership with Strassacker and influenced by international research, this garden is our commitment to transforming how cemeteries can support healing, provide beauty, and honour lives with intention and creativity.