She is only in her mid-30s but undertaker Victoria Allen has already sorted her funeral arrangements.

At her funeral parlour in Ludlow, she says her final send off will reflect her life: “green” and fun.

She indicates an environmentally friendly bamboo casket and says that this is the sort of thing she will be buried in.

“I will have a green funeral,” she says. “I wrote my funeral arrangements when I was 21 and the music – Fat Boy Slim, Neil Diamond and Enya – is all on a CD ready to go.”

These days, after a lifetime of pumping carbon into the earth’s atmosphere, returning to nature can be the final gesture of eco-friendliness, and one in which life’s last footprint is effectively carbon zero.

Green funerals are nothing new of course, but these days with talk of carbon off-setting and battles being fought to save the planet, more and more people are now demanding that their final farewell is not a goodbye wave through a hole in the ozone layer.

Instead they are choosing alternative funerals with green coffins and eco-pods made of anything from papier mache to seagrass and which are drawn by horse (“bring a bucket because that stuff is environmentally friendly too”) or even a tractor to a low-maintenance burial ground.

It means that in a few months the scores of people buried at the eco-friendly Ludford Meadow of Remembrance, where Victoria works alongside proprietors Lin and Roger Dalton, will be literally pushing up daisies as well as a sea of wildflowers.

Says Victoria: “People started becoming environmentally friendly and they started to ask us for cardboard coffins, but now we do them in wicker, willow and seagrass.

“There is a demand there and that is getting more and more. People come in as young as 30 to discuss what they want – mostly coffins and flowers and music – and they are aware of green issues.

“Around 60 per cent are humanist funerals without God.”

As one might expect, the majority of people pre-arranging green funerals are aged between 40 and 60. With a new generation of green-minded people coming through, there are some less than traditional types of funerals emerging.

One woman who had grown up on a farm in south Shropshire wanted her death to reflect her life so she had a tractor draw her to her final resting place instead of a hearse. She lay in a wicker casket on the tractor’s trailer.

“She used to play a lot on the tractor when she was a little girl and she told her family that she wanted either a horse and trailer or a tractor and trailer,” says Victoria.

In another break from tradition, with green funerals, many people ask mourners and funeral directors not to wear black, another indication that among eco-aware populations funerals are seen more of a celebration of life than the mourning of its passing.

Mourners can wear wellies if they want though. Or, better still, no shoes at all.

Victoria explains: “We had one funeral where the son carried his dad’s coffin and the coffin bearers weren’t wearing any shoes, but rainbow jumpers like his father.”

In other words, virtually anything goes so long as it does not adversely affect the environment. Individuality is actively encouraged.

Lin and Roger Dalton maintain the Meadow of Remembrance and are open about the issue which, to be frank, one day comes to us all.

There is not an ounce of morbidity to be detected in their attitude to death, nor in that of those who are now pushing up daisies. One environmentally-friendly stone marks the plot of a man who took the words of the great Spike Milligan to his death.

The stone reads: “I told you I was ill.”

“It can be a bad time,” says Lin. “It sounds unusual but I had one woman who said afterwards ‘I really enjoyed my husband’s funeral’.”

Located next to the graveyard at St Chad’s, where the layout of the headstones is more regimented and formal, it is clear that this green burial ground is more about evolving naturally.

Basically the deceased can be put to rest wherever they like, and like the people who lie here the meadow has a lifecycle of its own, the flora and fauna changing with the seasons.

Roger smiles as he talks about how a couple might come down here to discuss precisely where they want to be laid to rest – and sometimes have good-humoured quibbles about whether they want an eternal view of the Clee Hills or face the town where they once lived.

Lin indicates a peaceful area of the tranquil meadow where she and Roger will one day finally lie together.

“All my parents are in the church graveyard here,” she says.

“We are going to be buried in the corner over there so that we can keep our eyes on it all.”