The Day the Cemetery Gave Up Pesticides

Until 2015, the avenues of Père-Lachaise were treated with pesticides. Gardeners weeded the joints between the graves with chemicals. Roundup ran between the funerary slabs. Then the cemetery stopped altogether. No more glyphosate. No more chemical treatment of any kind. Nothing at all across the forty-four hectares of the largest green space within Paris. The decision, taken ahead of the 2017 Labbé law that would ban pesticides in public spaces, transformed Père-Lachaise within a decade. What had been a mineral cemetery with immaculate avenues became a wild garden of two hundred and twenty plant species, sixty-two bird species, three fox pairs and a protected buttercup.

Père-Lachaise's head keeper, Benoît Gallot, son and grandson of gravestone masons, lived through the change from the inside. Gallot had first rolled out a zero-pesticide plan at Ivry-sur-Seine in 2010, before coming to Père-Lachaise. “At first I resisted this new way of working, and now I'm not just convinced, I'm a convert,” the keeper admits. “Doing away with pesticides entirely has let an impressive biodiversity develop.” The shift was not easy. Gardeners had to relearn their trade: weeding by hand, mowing selectively — cutting the grass along busy avenues, letting it grow in the least-visited divisions — and accepting that wild plants would colonise abandoned graves. Gallot brought in a specialist consultancy to draw up a differentiated management plan for the green spaces.

“At first I was resistant to this new way of working, and now I am not just convinced but a true believer!” The curator Benoît Gallot sums up in one sentence ten years of ecological revolution at Père-Lachaise.

Ten years after pesticides stopped, Père-Lachaise has been transformed. The avenues are grassed. The paths between the graves have been turfed, either with pre-grown turf or by sowing. Violets, stonecrop, ivy-leaved toadflax and wall lettuce grow between the funerary slabs. Wild orchids appear in summer on the lawns of the south-eastern divisions. The small-flowered buttercup, a species protected in the Île-de-France region, has been identified in the cemetery. The return of plants brought the return of insects. The return of insects brought the return of birds — sixty-two species recorded between 2010 and 2020, including the tawny owl and the Eurasian sparrowhawk. The return of rodents brought foxes, which arrived in 2020. The food chain has rebuilt itself, unaided, across forty-four hectares hemmed in by the concrete of the twentieth arrondissement.

Père-Lachaise employs eighty staff: gravediggers, groundsmen, gardeners, keepers. The cemetery remains, above all, a cemetery — ten thousand ceremonies a year, grieving families, graves to maintain. Biodiversity is not a romantic choice: it is a management method. Père-Lachaise is closed to the public from six in the evening to eight in the morning and has no night-time lighting at all — the night is left to the animals. The Petite Ceinture, the disused railway line running along the cemetery's eastern edge, forms an ecological corridor linking the site to Paris's other green spaces. The keeper, Benoît Gallot, in La Vie secrète d'un cimetière (“The Secret Life of a Cemetery”), published by Les Arènes in 2022, describes how this choice changed the way Parisians see the place. Grieving families ask after the foxes. Visitors look up at the owls. Père-Lachaise is the same cemetery it was in 2015 — minus the pesticides, plus the life.