PARIS — Dry leaves rustled under Benoît Gallot’s footsteps as he made his way through the rugged terrain. He stopped at laurel and elder bushes and pulled aside their foliage to expose a crumbling stone colonnade. A parakeet, perched high in a nearby tree, screeched.
It looked like a scene set deep in one of France’s lush forests – but this was in one of the world’s most visited cemeteries, Père-Lachaise Cemetery, nestled between busy avenues in eastern Paris.
The cemetery has long been known as the final resting place for celebrated artists, including Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, and Édith Piaf. But in recent years it has also become a haven for the city’s flora and fauna. Foxes and tawny owls are among the many animals that call it home.
“Nature is taking back her rights,” said Mr. Gallot, the cemetery caretaker, responsible for overseeing the upkeep of the grounds and the allocation of burial grounds as he continued his journey among tombstones overrun by vines and weeds.
The greening of the necropolis stems from a decade-old plan to phase out pesticides and transform the cemetery into one of Paris’ green lungs as the populous capital redesigns its urban landscape to make it more climate-friendly in the face of rising temperatures.
By encouraging wildlife in a place dedicated to death, these efforts have also sparked a small revolution in the mores of French cemeteries, where traces of non-human life have long been considered disrespectful to the deceased.
“We’ve made a complete turnaround,” said Mr. Gallot. The Père-Lachaise, he added, shows that “the living and the dead can coexist.”
Opened in 1804, the 110-hectare cemetery — named after Louis XIV’s confessor, the Reverend François de La Chaise d’Aix — sits on a hill overlooking the center of Paris. The earliest tombstones rub shoulders with trees and plants in a park-like setting.
But as the site’s reputation grew, the lush greenery disappeared. First came the arrival of the supposed remains of the playwright Molière and the poet Jean de La Fontaine, transferred in 1817, prompting Parisians to claim their own final resting places near the illustrious residents. Sculpted vaults and chapels sprouted over the cemetery’s uneven terrain, nibbling on wildlife.
Today, some 1.3 million people, including Proust, Chopin and Sarah Bernhardt, are buried there, a figure equal to about half of the living population of Paris.
Then, in the second half of the last century, nature retreated further as a result of intensive weeding. Unlike northern and central Europe, such as Britain and Austria, where tombstones are scattered across verdant landscapes, France and other Latin American countries have favored rather austere, stony cemeteries, according to Bertrand Beyern, a cemetery guide. and historian.
Out of respect for the dead, no sign of life, except mourners, was allowed.
“The smallest dandelion had to be removed,” said Jean-Claude Lévêque, a gardener at the cemetery since 1983. He recalled how he and others poured gallons of pesticides on cemeteries several times a year. “It was the ‘golf green’ mentality.”
That approach began to change in 2011, when the city’s municipal government encouraged Paris cemeteries to phase out pesticides out of environmental concerns. Mr Gallot, then working at another cemetery on the outskirts of the capital, said he was initially “very hostile” to the initiative.
But when he saw flowers bloom again and birds return to their nests, he won.
A full ban on weed killers was in effect in 2015, and Xavier Japiot, a naturalist who worked for the Paris City Council, said a “rich ecosystem” had developed as a result.
The kidney-shaped leaves of cyclamen flowers — white, pink or lavender — are raised between raised crypts. Entire flocks of birds, including robins and flycatchers, have taken up residence in the graveyard’s vast canopy.
Some visitors found the changes not only pleasant, but also reassuring.
“This natural diversity diverts your attention from death,” said Philippe Lataste, a 73-year-old retiree who wandered the cobbled alleys of Père-Lachaise. “It’s less scary.”
Wildlife’s most spectacular outburst came at a time of exceptional mourning: the coronavirus crisis. In April 2020, in a ghostly locked Paris, Mr. Gallot came across a pair of foxes and their four cubs in the cemetery, a rare sighting in the city limits.
“It felt really good to see these cubs at the time,” said Mr Gallot, recalling a period marked by “non-stop funerals”.
The greening of the site has generated a new pool of visitors, the total number of which exceeds three million in a typical year. Now, alongside the streams of international tourists hunting for the cemetery’s most famous graves, burying their noses in celebrity-spotting maps, there are more local wanderers lured in by the promise of a nature getaway.
On a recent Sunday morning, 20 such nature lovers attended a birding tour at the cemetery, undeterred by the bitter cold that turned their noses red. Binoculars in hand, they listened attentively to the comments of Philippe Rance and Patrick Suiro, two amateur ornithologists who have made the Père-Lachaise their new playground.
The group froze at every chirp of a thrush or chaffinch, one hand holding the binoculars, the other a tombstone for balance. The site’s most famous species are the rose ring parakeets whose green feathers and high-pitched singing are hard to miss. Legend has it that the parakeets’ ancestors, who hail from Africa and India, escaped from a container at a Parisian airport in the 1970s, carrying flocks of birds that have since spread throughout France’s capital.
Mr Suiro said he has counted more than 100 bird species over the past two decades. He couldn’t help but be happy that the cemetery’s once huge cat population, fed by feline fans who left kibble in open vaults, has dwindled, mainly due to sterilization surgeries, to give way to robins.
Mr. Suiro, a passionate naturalist, has also documented dozens of orchids, which he likes to call by their Latin names. “Epipactis Helleborine,” he said excitedly during the Sunday tour, pointing to a brittle stem rising between two moss-covered tombstones.
Mr Beyern, the cemetery guide and historian, said the greening of the Père-Lachaise reflected a wider societal shift towards environmentalism.
In Paris, a capital with low tree cover, the cemetery’s canopy helps mitigate the effects of the increasingly hotter summers. ‘Eco-friendly’ cemeteries have sprung up across France, encouraging the use of biodegradable coffins and wooden headstones.
The new park-like setting on Père-Lachaise has had unexpected consequences.
Cemetery workers had become accustomed to dealing with fans getting drunk near Morrison’s grave or covering Wilde’s gravestone with lipstick kisses. But now, said Mr. Gallot, the curator, they’re busy chasing joggers and people putting down blankets for picnics.
“‘Your cemetery looks like Paris-Plages!'” he complained, referring to the artificial beaches that are built every summer along the Seine.
Still, Mr. Gallot said he likes the idea of a bustling cemetery.
In a recently published book about the ‘secret life’ of the Père-Lachaise, he described the grave where he himself would like to rest. He would be in a small garden, near a bush where robins could nest. A bench would be placed for passers-by. A planter would serve as a drinking trough for foxes and as a pond for birds.
“In short,” he wrote, “I would like my grave to be a lively place.”