This inner-city garden is an unlikely model for renewal and rebirth

Autumn is making its mark at the Melbourne General Cemetery. Bleached waves of knotty spear-grass are setting seed, kangaroo grass is blushing rust-red and tufted bluebells are turning paler by the day. Walk through this sprawling burial place and, amid the patina of tombstones and the pattern of pathways, grassland plants blow in the breeze and glow in the sun.

This 172-year-old cemetery has not always been so bucolic. The naturalistic mood comes from a recent wave of planting that has had such atmospheric effects that other cemeteries, including ones in Sydney and Queensland, are now looking to adopt similar measures.

A community planting day at Melbourne General Cemetery, just a stone’s throw from the CBD.Credit: Andy O’Connor

The new Melbourne General Cemetery landscaping program, called Project Cultivate, started in mid-2023 and 270,000 new Indigenous flowers, grasses and groundcovers have been planted so far. Helen Tuton, horticultural assets manager at the Southern Metropolitan Cemeteries Trust, says the plants, which are mostly being cultivated on earth-covered unmarked graves, are already providing a string of benefits.

Golden billy buttons and tufted bluebells attract butterflies, bees and other wildlife.Credit: Andy O’Connor

For one, the increased shade being cast over roadways, gravestones and other cemetery monuments means there is less radiant heat and a 3 degree to 5 degree reduction in ambient temperature, making the cemetery cooler and more inviting in warm weather.

The plants are also covering what was previously bare, weed attracting earth, paving the way for a different approach to maintenance, including a 70 per cent reduction in herbicide use. The hope is herbicides will soon be eliminated entirely.

Grasses wind around gravestones at Melbourne General Cemetery.Credit: Andy O’Connor

The plantings are attracting birds, bees, moths and other native creatures, and have also prompted numerous community events including planting days, bird surveys and seed-collection workshops. They are also providing a setting for more formal research projects.

With 230,00 more grasslands plants – covering more than 30 species – to be added this year, Tuton says the environmental and aesthetic benefits will multiply. “Not just because of the visible changes from the vegetation but also because of the improved condition of the soil.”

Tuton says the broad-scale application of herbicide in recent decades had left many areas of the Parkville cemetery with “absolutely no vegetation” and that even the five centimetre-layer of woodchip mulch applied a few months before planting made an “extraordinary difference” in terms of the soil’s water retention and worm activity.

The mulch also helped ensure 95 per cent of the new plantings succeeded, even though there is no irrigation and the plants have relied entirely on rainfall.

While this Project Cultivate program breaks new ground for cemeteries by focusing only on indigenous grassland species, there is nothing new about gardening around tombstones. Plants and graves have long gone together, especially in the landscaped park-like cemeteries of the 19th century.

Rookwood Cemetery, established in 1867 in Sydney, has everything from Bunya pines to a heritage rose garden, while the Boroondara General Cemetery, established in Kew in the 1850s, was laid out with serpentine paths, framed vistas, large trees and tiny bulbs.

But any garden needs care to keep it looking good. About a decade ago, Melbourne horticulturalist Helen Page began drawing people’s attention to the then sorry state of the Boroondara General Cemetery. She called for an end to the broad-scale herbicide spraying that was not only killing the institution’s unwanted plants but much else besides.

Page, a past chair of the Victorian branch of the Australian Garden History Society, engaged experts to prepare landscape reports, established a program of working bees and encouraged more judicious weeding so that the Boroondara General Cemetery would look more spontaneous and dynamic. “Cemeteries are such an opportunity for biodiversity and for addressing climate change,” says Page, who is still involved with the cemetery’s twice-monthly working bees. “Our suburbs are so heavily built up and cemeteries can be absolutely beautiful.”

Tuton agrees. “The joy I get when school kids come through and, instead of staying on the main roads, they veer off into the grasslands,” Tuton says. “Cemeteries are all about legacy and I see these plants as a way of adding to that.”

Although visitor feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, Tuton says some visitors to the Melbourne General Cemetery have reported that they would prefer to see “more traditional” cemetery plants. She says while there is still a place for roses, lavender and the like at the cemetery, “an important element of cemeteries getting it right” is to explain the thinking behind new approaches.

“We’re essentially recreating one of Australia’s most threatened ecosystems and recreating the grassland environment that would have been at that site before it was used as a cemetery. We want to bring biodiversity back and to create a self-sustaining landscape that will engage people in new ways.”

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