Nine Trees That Watched the Dead Go By

In Division 77 of Père-Lachaise, a Montpellier maple fourteen metres tall stretches its branches over the graves. Its trunk measures two metres thirty-two in circumference. The tree was planted in 1833 — three years after the July Revolution, eleven years before Paris's first railway line, twenty years before Haussmann. It is the oldest tree at Père-Lachaise, and one of the oldest trees within central Paris. The City of Paris has designated nine trees in the cemetery as “remarkable trees” — a label given to exceptional specimens for their age, size, botanical rarity or landscape value. Among the four thousand one hundred and thirty-four trees of Père-Lachaise, these nine each tell a story.

The Cedar of Lebanon in Division 4, planted in 1870, reaches twenty-five metres in height, with a circumference of three metres seventy-two. It is the most imposing tree in the cemetery — a stately conifer that overlooks the main entrance and the earliest divisions, those of the original romantic cemetery of 1804. The common plane tree in Division 45, planted in 1890, measures twenty-six metres. It is the tallest tree at Père-Lachaise. Its roots have engulfed the neighbouring graves, gripping the gravestones in a network of wood that seems to be digesting the stone — a phenomenon the keepers call “vegetal necrophagy”. The horse chestnut in Division 76, twenty-two metres tall with a girth of three metres forty-seven, completes the trio of giants. All three trees were planted in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the cemetery was already crowded with graves.

The Montpellier maple in Division 77, planted in 1833, is the oldest tree at Père-Lachaise and one of the oldest in Paris. Fourteen metres tall, with a girth of two metres thirty-two, it stood there before Haussmann.

Père-Lachaise's botanical rarities are concentrated in the south-eastern divisions, on the Charonne plateau. In Division 75, a gum tree — a Eucommia ulmoides, known as the gutta-percha tree — stands twelve metres tall with a circumference of one metre twenty. Planted in 1959, it is the only latex-producing tree found in Europe's temperate climate. The sap of this tree, native to China, was used in the nineteenth century to make gutta-percha, the electrical insulation of the first transatlantic underwater cables. In Division 77, next to the venerable Montpellier maple, grow a twelve-metre date-plum, planted in 1913 — the persimmon tree — and a ten-metre Kentucky coffeetree, planted in 1924, recognisable by its grey bark, which flakes off in patches. In Divisions 78 and 84, two ginkgo bilobas, fifteen and twenty metres tall, planted in 1930, form a pair of “living fossils” — the species first appeared two hundred and seventy million years ago.

Père-Lachaise's nine remarkable trees are protected under a specific management plan drawn up by the City of Paris. The cemetery, which has used no chemical treatments since 2015, lets its trees age naturally — cavities in the trunks serve as nests for tawny owls and tits, and dead branches are left on the ground to feed insects that depend on decaying wood. The 1833 Montpellier maple, the 1870 Cedar of Lebanon, the 1890 plane tree: these three trees lived through the Paris Commune, two world wars and the transformation of the surrounding district. A visitor walking along the Chemin du Dragon towards the south-eastern divisions passes beneath a canopy planted before their great-grandparents were born. Père-Lachaise is an open-air museum of sculpture — but it is also a forty-four-hectare arboretum where nine trees have earned the title of living monuments.