SERIES 36 | Episode 39
When the Melbourne General Cemetery opened in the 1850s, it was designed as public park and visitors would come to explore the winding paths, trees and open grassy areas.
Now the 43-hectare site is jam-packed with around 300,000 recorded burials, multiple mausoleums, a prime ministers’ memorial garden, and even a grotto in honour of Elvis.
The site has almost reached capacity and the end of its ‘working’ life, but the site will always be maintained as a park, says horticulturist Helen Tuton, a former researcher with Gardening Australia who now leads the Southern Melbourne Cemeteries Trust team that tends this cemetery and several others.
The way the site was being managed was unsustainable, requiring a lot of herbicide and other resources to just keep the weeds down. “There’s no environmental benefit in any of that,” Helen says. The team also wanted to improve barren areas that were hot, unappealing and prone to runoff, and turn them into something more meaningful.
“That’s how we came up with Project Cultivate.”
The team looked at old flora studies of the site as well as researching what the landscape would have looked like before it became a cemetery; it was part of a grassy woodland. To regenerate that grassland, they then looked at what plants were suitable for the site’s current use.
There was no ability to do soil improvement, so instead they imported mulch, which was spread by hand between the headstones; by the time the project is finished, the team will have hand raked 5,600 cubic metres of mulch. Within a month they could see an improvement in the soil.
The cemetery covers 101 acres and the project has so far covered about a third of that, which are all unmarked graves; they’re aiming to plant out 56 acres in total.
Some people have loved what they’ve seen and asked Helen’s team to plant the areas they tend as well, but otherwise they are not planting out marked graves.
Grasses form a major component of the planting and bring movement to an otherwise static landscape. Kangaroo grass would have been the dominant grass and is already self-seeding. There are two types of Poa, too, which attract a lot of beneficial insects.
Flowers include golden billy buttons, common everlasting and dianellas.
A quarter of a million plants have been planted so far. The project is due for completion at the end of 2025, and by then half a million plants should be in the ground.
Helen hopes that people in 50 years’ time will visit the area and appreciate the mature grasslands as much as today’s visitors enjoy the mature cypress trees.
Featured Plants KANGAROO GRASSThemeda triandraTUSSOCK GRASSPoa sp.GOLDEN BILLY BUTTONSPycnosorus chrysanthusEVERLASTINGChrysocephalum sp.
Filmed on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country | Parkville, Vic
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