From Snakeroot to Salamanders, Life Thrives in Cemeteries

The weathered gravestones at Mount Olivet Cemetery, the final resting place of more than 180,000 people, mark a city of the dead that is incongruously alive.

On a slope overlooking northeast Washington, D.C., near the graves of the Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt and White House architect James Hoban, oak trees rustle their leaves. Golden dragonflies zip through sunbeams and bumblebees flit between purple coneflowers. A blue jay screeches while a downy woodpecker hammers at a branch. 

All of the activity is concentrated around newly constructed rain gardens—ditches partitioned by weirs, filled with gravel and soil and native plants—that catch stormwater running off the cemetery’s hillsides. Instead of flooding the grounds and overwhelming the sewer system, the water is safely filtered back underground and into the Anacostia River watershed. Though a summer drought left them dry, the gardens bloom with ironweed and black-eyed susans and buzz with insects, the foundations of a vigorous ecosystem among the dead.

Mount Olivet, founded in 1858 as a racially integrated Catholic burial ground, is not the only historical American cemetery being reimagined as a resilient haven for wildlife. Other 19th-century garden cemeteries—a style of burial ground that combined reverence for the dead with Romantic interpretations of nature—are retrofitting their secluded groves and quiet ponds as sanctuaries for flora and fauna that have long been absent from the surrounding urban landscape. Native plants and fungi with appropriately spooky names (snakeroot, weeping widows, witch’s butter) are sprouting among the graves, while modern infrastructure to address flooding also creates places for frogs, butterflies, and birds. Even bats and coyotes are moving in.

“To Rob Death of a Portion of Its Terrors”

For centuries, Christians buried their dead in churchyards. The graves were protected by a fence as well as the comforting shadow of the church itself. Society’s outcasts were interred beyond the village limits, in spiritual and actual wilderness. “Nature was not welcomed” within the churchyards, James R. Cothran and Erica Danylchak write in Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement. Some members of the clergy even associated certain plants and trees with pagan religions or viewed nature as evil.

Puritan immigrants carried this attitude with them to New England in the 17th and 18th centuries. “For the first settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” historian Blanche M. G. Linden writes, “the woods were a netherworld where the faithful could be bewildered by evil spirits, witches, or even the devil himself. A hostile, menacing nature loomed large around the Puritan town.” Boston’s leaders thus established burial grounds in the town’s center—and quickly ran out of space. The Granary Burying Ground, founded in 1660, became so overstuffed that bodies had to be buried four deep in unmarked, common plots. 

By the dawn of the 19th century, Puritanism had declined and so had the care of Boston’s graveyards. The city’s board of health found “the odor being such as to sicken persons in the vicinity. The tombs were exceedingly dilapidated, giving free vent to gases, and in some instances men cutting grass had fallen into them. The soil of both the Granary and King’s Chapel was fairly saturated with buried remains, the two cemeteries containing about 3000 bodies” in a combined area smaller than two football fields.

The situation demanded innovative solutions. Dr. Jacob Bigelow, a lecturer in medicine and botany at Harvard, gathered some of the city’s civic leaders at his home and proposed a new style of burying ground, one that would “rob death of a portion of its terrors.” The cemetery would be located outside the city in a plot of woodland already known as Sweet Auburn, “in which the beauties of nature should, as far as possible, relieve from their repulsive features the tenements of the deceased” and soothe the grief of mourners, he wrote.

When it opened in 1831, Mount Auburn Cemetery epitomized what historian Philippe Ariès calls the “Age of the Beautiful Death,” wherein the earthly trials of the deceased were left behind for an afterlife of peace with loved ones in eternity. The concept dovetailed with Americans’ changing view of nature, influenced by European Romanticism and the contrast between America’s industrialization and its rural past. Experience in nature—or a suburban approximation of it, improved by human hands—came to be “the essential source of moral, intellectual, poetic, and spiritual energy,” Denise Otis writes in Grounds for Pleasure: Four Centuries of the American Garden. In this way, Mount Auburn and the garden cemeteries that followed were always built more for the living than for the dead.

Mount Auburn Cemetery: A Refuge for the Living

Then, as now, visitors to Mount Auburn enter through a large gate in the Egyptian Revival style. Walking paths named after plants wind through glens where headstones and monuments nestle in the vegetation. Weeping willows arch over picturesque ponds. Benches and fountains give visitors places to rest and contemplate. Before public parks were common, Mount Auburn served as a lush refuge where families could socialize, have picnics, and breathe fresh, unpolluted air among the monuments. Now, it’s adding to that legacy by welcoming back native flora and fauna as well as citizen scientists.

The effort began in 2014 with a meeting of teams of biologists, ecologists, herpetologists, ornithologists, hydrologists, habitat restoration specialists, and landscape designers, says Paul Kwiatkowski, director of urban ecology and sustainability at Mount Auburn Cemetery. After walking among and observing the landscape’s features, the teams developed a “mini masterplan” with two initial goals, he tells Mental Floss: removing invasive and undesirable plants and replanting with native species, which provide better habitat for wildlife while improving Mount Auburn’s aesthetic appearance; and conducting terrestrial and aquatic species surveys to determine what was already living in the cemetery’s ponds and meadows.

“This effort provided the information required to expand a plan for the reintroduction of native amphibian species that once resided at the cemetery, but were no longer present,” Kwiatkowski says. “We have since successfully reintroduced breeding populations of American toads, spring peepers, and gray treefrogs, and we have a list of amphibians, reptiles, and fish that we hope to introduce in the future.”

The initial projects evolved into Mount Auburn’s Wildlife Action Plan, which continues to develop new initiatives to engage the community in its ongoing conservation activities. Beginning in 2016, the cemetery launched its Citizen Science Naturalist Program, which recruits local experts from Boston’s many colleges and universities to help design and implement biodiversity research field projects on the grounds. The program also runs field training and a classroom to create a team of knowledgeable citizen scientists to support the studies. More than 300 people have attended classroom instruction since 2016 and 50 field assistants take part in ongoing field work each year, which includes studies of urban bats and coyotes, surveys of breeding bird populations, insect counts, fungi and lichen monitoring, and the reintroduction of the native red-backed salamander. More than 500 species of animals, plants, and fungi have been spotted in Mount Auburn and logged into the popular iNaturalist app. 

All of the conservation and horticultural work that takes place at Mount Auburn has to be done without harming the historic monuments and burial plots, which exist in all sizes and dimensions. For example, 1960s-era markers installed at grade with the ground present a challenge for replanting, says Dennis Collins, the cemetery’s horticultural curator. At that time, “nearly all of the grounds were simply covered in grass and maintained with regular mowing. To introduce alternative groundcovers around these monuments, care must be taken to allow visitors to find them, and to read the inscriptions,” Collins tells Mental Floss.

When installing new wildflower meadows around the flat plaques, the staff has surrounded the gravesites with patches of grass so visitors can find their loved ones among the sprawl of nature.

Mount Olivet Cemetery: From Roads to Rain Gardens

Founded just before the Civil War, Mount Olivet Cemetery brought Mount Auburn’s winding paths, sheltering groves, and contemplative atmosphere to Washington, D.C. Its exposed location on the crest of a hill creates the illusion of its monuments floating above the rest of the cityscape. Weathered white obelisks, praying angels, and crosses rise up from the lawn against blue sky.

This landscape has caused the cemetery a serious problem in recent years, however. Rainfall doesn’t soak harmlessly into the ground, but hits impervious pavement and flows downhill into Hickey Run, a tributary of the Anacostia River. On the way, it collects oil, sediment, and trash and carries it directly into the already-polluted waters. The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, which owns the cemetery, was paying tens of thousands of dollars in impervious area charges—calculated according to its square footage of surfaces like roads and lawns—to the city each year and needed to reduce its thousands of gallons of runoff.

The stormwater issue was not unique to Mount Olivet. To find a sustainable, citywide solution, the District of Columbia established a first-of-its-kind stormwater retention credit (SRC) market in 2014, which allows property owners to retrofit impervious surfaces with water-retaining green infrastructure, like flower beds and shrubbery. That generates credits that the property can sell on the SRC market. Other properties purchase the credits to meet a portion of their legally mandated stormwater retention requirements. Thus, both seller and buyer save money in stormwater fees while enhancing the landscape.

Mount Olivet was eager to be the first property to test this model [PDF] and began collaborating with The Nature Conservancy’s Maryland and D.C. chapter in 2017 to bring a pilot project to fruition. “One thing that came up repeatedly in conversations, both with the Archdiocese and also during events that were were holding around this, was [that] they wanted to connect the work happening at Mount Olivet with the pope’s encyclical on the environment, [which] had come out fairly recently at that time, about care for the Earth,” Matthew Kane, the conservancy’s associate director of communications, tells Mental Floss.

“They saw that this work had a clear connection to that call, to better care for the world around them—which was a really wonderful message for them to be bringing to their audiences and to the members of the Catholic church in Washington,” he says.

The Nature Conservancy set up a company to manage the cemetery’s generation of SRC credits and arranged private funding to develop several qualifying green infrastructure projects at Mount Olivet. The first, a major initiative to install nine rain gardens, was completed in summer 2024.

Based on a study of the site’s topography, soil composition, and layout, which included the use of ground-penetrating radar and historical documents to determine the location of graves, engineers replaced underused roadways with linear rain gardens—effectively turning one lane of several two-way roads into long basins planted with native flora. During storms, rain flows downhill and collects in these basins, where it trickles slowly through layers of substrate back into the ground. The gardens don’t just reduce runoff; they also provide habitat for pollinating insects and enrich the cemetery’s aesthetic virtues for visitors. The Archdiocese and The Nature Conservancy also worked with a local nonprofit, Casey Trees, to replace disused sidewalks with new plantings.

At the conclusion of all phases of the project in 2024, the numbers are impressive. It generated 217,717 credits for the cemetery to sell on the stormwater market, the proceeds from which can be reinvested in more green infrastructure developments. So far, the rain gardens have replaced more than 44,000 square feet of impervious surfaces and have kept 5,357,233 gallons of stormwater from flooding and polluting Hickey Run. The groups have also planted 420 trees and 182 shrubs, where new populations of birds are starting to move in.

“Through this project, I feel like the cemetery has really embraced being a space for people to visit and to enhance their environmental footprint,” Aileen Craig, The Nature Conservancy’s D.C. program director, tells Mental Floss. “They’ve been looking for other initiatives and other ways to continue this work. The inspiration that this project has been to the cemetery itself to do more, and to other cemeteries that are part of the Catholic Archdiocese, is very special.” 

Green-Wood Cemetery: An Evolving Landscape

By the mid-19th century, at least six other U.S. cities had established a rural cemetery based on Mount Auburn’s philosophy and design. Green-Wood in Brooklyn, New York, opened in 1838 and encompasses 478 acres of natural hills, valleys, and ponds carved by the retreat of ice age glaciers. Among the knolls and groves lie 570,000 graves marked with statues, busts, monuments, and elaborate mausoleums in a mix of architectural styles, honoring a similar amalgam of deceased New Yorkers, from Samuel F. B. Morse and Louis Comfort Tiffany to Charles Feltman, inventor of the hot dog. 

In addition to its permanent residents, Green-Wood is home to an varied array of living things. It boasts some of the city’s oldest and largest trees, including a former state champion sassafras. An extensive survey of the cemetery’s wildlife and ecosystems, published in 2018, found 129 species of birds, three reptiles, three amphibians, 12 mammals (including six bat species), and more than 90 moths and butterflies [PDF], among other taxa.

In practical terms, “Green-Wood is the largest privately owned piece of land in all of New York City,” says Matt Rea, director of strategic partnerships at The Nature Conservancy. Any issues involving the landscape have an impact on the surrounding community and city infrastructure, he says, but efforts to correct them can also have a large-scale effect.

Like Mount Olivet, Green-Wood had its own problems with stormwater flooding one of the ponds and frequently overflowing the neighborhood’s combined sewer system (in which sewage and storm runoff move through the same pipes). In 2021, Green-Wood’s vice president of horticulture, Joseph Charap, heard about The Nature Conservancy’s projects at Mount Olivet. “We have 186-year-old infrastructure that was never built to handle the amount of rainfall that we’re receiving today,” he tells Mental Floss. “I said, ‘you know, they’re doing that there, and we have all these water resources and we are connected to the combined sewer’ … there was a direct line of inspiration.”

Green-Wood and The Nature Conservancy collaborated to study the overflow patterns, design a stormwater reduction project, and acquire city and state funding to build it. The final plan focused on Sylvan Water, the cemetery’s largest pond, which routinely flooded its service yard and cut off access to one of its entrance gates. The cemetery and its partners settled on a five-pronged project. At Sylvan Water, engineers installed an algorithm-based, adaptive system that predicts how much rainfall will occur in a given storm, then remotely opens a valve to release that amount of water from the pond into the sewer prior to the event. The system allows rainwater to collect in the pond during storms without overwhelming the surrounding infrastructure.  

Adjacent to Sylvan Water, the cemetery built a reuse vault that filters water from the pond to be used for irrigating the shrubs, grasses, and trees throughout the property. It also constructed a huge, underground tank—like “a giant swimming pool,” Charap says—that can hold 66,000 gallons of stormwater before gradually releasing it into the sewer. At ground level, four large sections of asphalt were replaced with permeable pavers that absorb water, and a small bioswale (a stormwater-catcher similar to a rain garden) was installed. 

One part of the plan remains to be built: an emergent habitat of native aquatic plants around the edge of the water body that will offer beauty as well as a nurturing environment for insects, birds, and amphibians—including northern spring peepers and northern gray tree frogs, two native frog species that were not seen during the 2018 survey. Those plantings will complement other areas of the cemetery that have been transformed from turf into native wildflower meadows.

With the stormwater system newly finished, it’s too soon to observe how well it’s working. Usually, there’s a three-month learning phase as the system calibrates. But “if we did our jobs as engineers and designers, Green-Wood won’t see anything,” Rea says. “The only thing they will see is that it doesn’t flood anymore like it used to flood.”

Like Mount Olivet, Green-Wood aims to be a test of a new approach to reimagining private cemeteries as good environmental stewards, using a variety of funding sources for public benefit. Charap hopes that “Green-Wood can serve as a model for successful, publicly funded projects on private land that have a direct impact on the city at large”—an effect that dovetails with the history of garden cemeteries as the country’s public first green spaces, as places to celebrate life as well as commemorate those who have passed on.

“They have this environmental legacy as part of their framework,” he says. “These landscapes have been evolving ever since they were first conceived. Cemeteries are … now reflecting the evolution of views of the natural world, just as much as they do mortality.”

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