A viral photograph of a newborn baby next to his placenta, the umbilical cord spelling out “love”, has prompted discussion about birth rituals – and a couple of snarky tweets.

Brisbane photographer Emma Jean Nolan posted the black-and-white photograph of Harper Hoani Spies next to his placenta on her professional Facebook page on Sunday, just 90 minutes after he was born. Since then the post has received more than 3,000 likes and 750 shares.

Harper’s mother Jolene Spies, descended from the Ngai Tahu iwi or tribe of the southern region of New Zealand, commissioned Nolan as a birth photographer.

In the post, Nolan quotes the website Mothers Matter to explain the sacred link between the organ and the land in Maori culture, expressed in Te Reo, the Maori language, with the same word.

“As a Maori baby, [Harper’s] placenta will now be returned to the land,” she writes. “Whenua (placenta) is returned to the whenua (land) with the pito (umbilical cord) the link between the newborn and papatuanuku (mother earth). With this affinity established, each individual fulfils the role of curator for papatuanuku, which remains lifelong.”

The post has generated conversation about birth rituals.

Facebook user Jackie Kainuku said the practice of burying the placenta was “very common” in New Zealand.

She kept her three sons’ placentas in a freezer for six years, “waiting for the right place to bury them”. Before she moved to Australia in 2011, she buried them with her partner’s late sister. “It was a very meaningful and beautiful way to give back to the Earth for our boys,” she said.

Another commenter Crystal Gell said she put her daughter’s placenta in a pot in soil and planted a lime tree in it: “We are waiting to build our house so we can transfer it to the ground,” she said.

Nolan, who is also a trained midwife, told Guardian Australia the practice of returning the placenta to the earth is not common in western cultures.

“Even many people who live in Australia but who are from cultures that follow this practice often don’t do it,” she said. “However it is clear from the response to this post that there are a lot of people still doing it – many will go to the lengths of travelling home from overseas to bury it on their home land.”

The comments on Nolan’s photo on Facebook are overwhelmingly positive, but elsewhere the internet has made other suggestions – some definitely tongue-in-cheek – for purposes that placenta could be applied to.

The Cut writer Jessica Roy proposed other phrases that could be spelled with “navel string”, including “FIRST!!!1” and “LET’S GO METS”.

A five-year-old online tutorial for “placenta art” – which includes such helpful suggestions as “be well prepared”, “you don’t need to use paint to make the prints. There is enough blood in the placenta”, and “use heavy watercolour paper so the paper won’t curl when it gets wet” – also resurfaced with Nolan’s photo.

Eating your placenta, once perceived as solely the eccentricity of celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and January Jones, is apparently now more widespread, with cooked or encapsulated in an easy-to-swallow pill among the options.