PARIS — Dry leaves rustled below Benoît Gallot’s footsteps as he rambled his manner throughout the rugged terrain. Stopping by shrubs of laurel and elder, he pulled apart their foliage to uncover a crumbling stone colonnade. A parakeet, perched up in a close-by tree, squawked.
It regarded like a scene deep in one among France’s luxuriant forests — however this was inside one of many world’s most visited burial grounds, the Père-Lachaise cemetery, nestled between traffic-laden avenues in jap Paris.
The cemetery has lengthy been often known as the ultimate resting place for celebrated artists, together with Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde and Édith Piaf. However lately, it has additionally turn into a haven for town’s natural world. Foxes and tawny owls are among the many many animals calling it residence.
“Nature’s taking again its rights,” mentioned Mr. Gallot, the cemetery’s curator, chargeable for overseeing grounds upkeep and allocating burial plots, as he continued his trek amongst tombstones engulfed by vines and weeds.
The greening of the necropolis stems from a decade-old plan to part out pesticides and switch the cemetery into one among Paris’s inexperienced lungs, because the dense capital is redesigning its urban landscape to make it more climate-friendly within the face of rising temperatures.
By encouraging wildlife in a spot devoted to dying, these efforts have additionally caused a small revolution within the mores of French cemeteries, the place traces of nonhuman life have lengthy been seen as disrespectful to the deceased.
“We’ve made a whole turnaround,” Mr. Gallot mentioned. The Père-Lachaise, he added, reveals that “the dwelling and lifeless can coexist.”
Opened in 1804, the 110-acre cemetery — named after Louis XIV’s confessor, the Rev. François de La Chaise d’Aix — perches on a hillside peering down at central Paris. Its earliest headstones rubbed shoulder with bushes and vegetation throughout a park-like setting.
However as the location’s status grew, its lush greenery receded. First got here the arrival of the presumed stays of the playwright Molière and the poet Jean de La Fontaine, transferred in 1817, prompting Parisians to need to declare their very own remaining resting locations close to the illustrious residents. Sculpted vaults and chapels sprouted throughout the cemetery’s uneven land, nibbling away at wildlife.
At present, some 1.3 million people, together with Proust, Chopin and Sarah Bernhardt, are interred there, a determine equal to about half of Paris’s dwelling inhabitants.
Then, within the second half of the previous century, nature retreated additional because of intense weeding operations. Not like in Northern and Central Europe — equivalent to in Britain and Austria, the place tombstones unfold throughout verdant landscapes — France and different Latin international locations have favored somewhat austere, stony burial grounds, in response to Bertrand Beyern, a cemetery information and historian.
No signal of life, aside from mourners, was to be allowed in, out of respect for the lifeless.
“The smallest dandelion needed to be eradicated,” mentioned Jean-Claude Lévêque, a gardener on the cemetery since 1983. He recalled how, a number of occasions a yr, he and others would pour gallons of pesticides onto burial plots. “It was the ‘golf inexperienced’ mentality.”
That method began to alter in 2011, when town’s municipal authorities inspired Paris’s cemeteries to part out pesticides, out of environmental concern. Mr. Gallot, then working at one other cemetery on the capital’s outskirts, mentioned he was initially “very hostile” to the initiative.
However seeing flowers bloom once more and birds return to nest gained him over.
By 2015, a full ban on weedkillers was in pressure, and Xavier Japiot, a naturalist working for the Paris municipality, mentioned a “wealthy ecosystem” had developed in consequence.
The kidney-shaped leaves of cyclamen flowers — white, pink or lavender — have popped up between raised crypts. Complete choirs of birds, together with robins and flycatchers, have settled within the cemetery’s huge cover.
Some guests have discovered the adjustments not solely pleasing but in addition reassuring.
“This pure variety distracts your consideration from dying,” mentioned Philippe Lataste, a 73-year-old retiree, who was wandering the Père-Lachaise’s cobbled alleys. “It’s much less scary.”
Essentially the most spectacular burst of wildlife occurred throughout a time of remarkable mourning: the coronavirus disaster. In April 2020, in a ghostly Paris under lockdown, Mr. Gallot got here throughout a pair of foxes and their 4 cubs within the cemetery, a uncommon sighting within the metropolis limits.
“To see these cubs at that second, it felt actually good,” Mr. Gallot mentioned, recalling a interval marked by “nonstop funerals.”
The greening of the location has introduced a brand new pool of tourists, whose whole quantity surpasses three million in a typical yr. Now, alongside the streams of worldwide vacationers looking for the cemetery’s most well-known graves, their noses buried in celebrity-spotting maps, there are extra native wanderers drawn by the promise of a nature getaway.
On a current Sunday morning, 20 such nature lovers attended a hen tour within the cemetery, undaunted by the bitter chilly that turned their noses pink. Binoculars in hand, they listened fastidiously to the feedback of Philippe Rance and Patrick Suiro, two newbie ornithologists who’ve made the Père-Lachaise their new playground.
The group froze at each chirp of a thrush or chaffinch, one hand holding the binoculars, the opposite a tombstone for steadiness. The positioning’s most well-known species are the rose-ringed parakeets whose inexperienced feathers and high-pitched warbles are onerous to overlook. Legend has it that the progenitors of the parakeets, native to Africa and India, escaped from a container in a Paris airport within the Nineteen Seventies, with flocks of the birds since spreading all through France’s capital.
Mr. Suiro mentioned he has counted over 100 species of birds prior to now 20 years. He couldn’t assist however rejoice that the cemetery’s as soon as monumental cat inhabitants, fed by feline followers who left kibble in open vaults, has dwindled, primarily due to sterilization operations, making manner for robins.
A passionate naturalist, Mr. Suiro has additionally documented dozens of orchids, which he likes to name by their Latin names. “Epipactis helleborine,” he mentioned excitedly in the course of the Sunday tour, pointing to a frail stem rising between two moss-covered gravestones.
Mr. Beyern, the cemetery information and historian, mentioned the greening of the Père-Lachaise mirrored a broader societal shift towards environmentalism.
In Paris, a capital with a low tree cover, the cemetery’s cover helps mitigate the results of increasingly scorching summers. Throughout France, “eco-friendly” cemeteries have sprung up, encouraging using biodegradable coffins and wood grave markers.
The brand new park-like setting at Père-Lachaise has had sudden penalties.
Cemetery staff had grown used to coping with followers getting drunk close to Morrison’s grave or protecting Wilde’s tombstone in lipstick kisses. However now, mentioned Mr. Gallot, the curator, they’re busy chasing joggers and folks laying down blankets for picnics.
“‘Your cemetery appears to be like like Paris-Plages!’” he mentioned some longtime guests complained, referring to the artificial beaches set up every summer along the Seine river.
Nonetheless, Mr. Gallot mentioned he likes the thought of a cemetery bustling with exercise.
In a lately revealed book on the “secret life” of the Père-Lachaise, he described the grave the place he himself wish to relaxation. It might stand in a small backyard, close to a shrub the place robins may nest. A bench could be put in for passers-by. A planter would function a water trough for foxes and a pool for birds.
“In brief,” he wrote, “I would love my grave to be a full of life place.”
