Birches Crematorium & Remembrance Park

22/08/2025

We will be closed on Wednesday 3rd September due to work being carried out on the local electricity grid.

Our gardens will remain open however our building will not be open and our phones lines will be out of operation.

We will be back in the office on Thursday 4th September as usual.

15/08/2025

Aaaannnd that's a wrap! The Summer cut of our meadow is complete with huge thanks to the Garden team and Steve Tomlin Crafts

As some of you probably know, we manage our meadow using traditional techniques, Scything and raking up the grass and wildflowers by hand, although we do move it using a tractor and trailer so we have a little modern day help!

This is a big job that we undertake twice a year and is vital in preserving and improving the biodiversity of our site, reducing our carbon foot print and keeping traditional skills alive. Here's our Assistant Head Gardener, Ben in action and standing triumphantly with the great hay stack! 🌾🌾🌾

01/08/2025

Important - A556 Road Closure

We've been made aware that the A556 dual carriageway between the A559 (Lostock Gralam) and the A530 King Street roundabout will be completely closed in the Chester direction for two weeks from Monday 4th August.

One lane will be closed in the Manchester direction.

Please allow more time for your journey if you are planning on attending a service with us.

More details are available via the One Network website: https://one.network/

29/07/2025

It was such a pleasure to take part in 'Chatty Tuesday' with Louise Walch Family Funeral Services. These are a great idea and a way to break down misconceptions about funerals with people from across the different areas of bereavement.

Looking forward to watching future instalments!

25/07/2025

As you may have gathered the northwest (that includes Cheshire!) was declared to be under drought conditions some time back in May – after a ‘prolonged dry period’. Of course these warnings are based on reservoir levels and relate to our drinking water supply. In gardening terms our plants have been under dry stress since March, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that we were not having the usual levels of rain. Delaying our plans to update planting schemes and add additional shrubs.

We have tried to tailor the planting at Birches to contain a mix of species that can cope with prolonged high moisture levels (you remember last summer when it rained nearly every week from late May ‘til September!) as well as drought. However, no one plant can cope with all threats so it is inevitable that some parts of the gardens will be struggling with our current situation. You may have noticed that flowers that are pretty reliable for late August have come and gone already, desperate to get their seeds down before they run out of energy! Equally we as gardeners struggle with the extremes of weather – digging in clay that has been baked hard for five months is hard work and trying to establish new plants in the rubbly dust would require huge amounts of water– so we are not planning to replace plants lost to the drought until we have had a prolonged wet period, which at this point seems unlikely until at least Autumn if not the following Spring

Rest assured we check all the garden on a weekly basis and assess what plants are going to need additional support in the week to come, watering where appropriate – the caveat is that, if plants are struggling for lack of water, we may decide to replace them with varieties that are more tolerant of the conditions we are expecting to become increasingly common in our little corner of the British Isles and save the drinking water!
We thank you for your patience.

24/07/2025

Could you be a new member of the Birches team?
We have vacancies for new part time colleagues, with a variety of shifts available.
Please see our advert on indeed or contact us with your CV and availability/hours and shift preferences to be considered.

Online applications:
https://uk.indeed.com/viewjob?jk=c8268bc724b8605f&

22/07/2025

We were so pleased to be able to support the great work at Bereaved Parents' Club - give them a follow on social media and share on your feed, you never know who might need to hear their message.

We are sending out a big thank you today and are so very grateful to Pete and all the staff at Birches Crematorium & Remembrance Park who have so very kindly funded a print run of our bookmarks. These bookmarks sign post to our website where we have all our podcast episode listings and links to where you can listen to our podcast.
If you can distribute any bookmarks to bereaved parents and their families or have a place you can put them for people to pick up please direct message us and we can post some to you.
We are particularly keen to get them with social services and family centres, if you can help us with this please let us know?

Thank you ❤️
Tracy, Debbie, Lauren & Liz

22/07/2025

Thank you for your patience whilst our IT system was repaired this morning. We are now fully back online and working through any messages we received while we were offline.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

22/07/2025

Please bear with us whilst we await repair to our IT systems.
Funeral services taking place are unaffected.

21/07/2025

For those of us who can’t make it in person today but wish to pay their respects to our colleague John, you can stream the service using the details below.

Thank you all for your kind messages of support at this sad time.

18/07/2025

11/07/2025

Final reminder for our summer service this Sunday! Last year's event proved to be a wonderful day and hopefully this year should be too. There'll be music, readings and refreshments afterwards.

The weather is forecast to be sunny and quite hot, so if you are planning on attending please remember sun protection and to stay hydrated. While we are outside for the service itself there is limited shade but the refreshments afterwards will be indoors. If the weather is too hot, we will be moving the service indoors to the air-conditioned hall of remembrance.