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Scattered between the gray tombstones of an old cemetery in Aldborough, England, you will find early purple orchids swaying in the shin-high grass. Although farms and cities have consumed much of this species’ forest and grassland habitat, the human tradition of laying the dead to rest in terrestrial burial grounds has given this population a place to grow relatively free of human disturbance. A similar pairing can be found across the continent on the Greek island of Crete, where pink butterfly orchids bloom beside the marble crosses that mark graves. The orchid species seems to have found protection among the tombstones. And they’re not alone.
At least 65 different species of the delicately flowered plants have been identified in the burial grounds of Europe, according to a study published in Global Ecology and Conservation in August. A team of Hungarian scientists meticulously documented orchid diversity across 2,079 cemeteries in 13 European countries spanning from Slovakia to Spain.
Many orchids rely on complex relationships with pollinating insects, soil fungi, and even host trees to grow and reproduce, making them exceptionally vulnerable to environmental changes. As a result, they serve as a kind of bellwether: In places where they do flourish, it is often because the larger local ecosystem is healthy and thriving.
Many species of orchids are specially adapted to grow in nutrient-poor meadows where few other plants can survive. But these habitats are disappearing due to fertilizer runoff from farms and the decline of traditional sheep grazing practices that maintain open grasslands. Orchids have been on a decades-long decline throughout Europe.
Cemeteries are some of the most biodiverse habitats in and near cities.
Study author Molnár Attila, a Hungarian botanist, became interested in the morbid relationship between orchids and the dead after he visited several Turkish cemeteries in 2013 that are known among plant enthusiasts as great places to see wild orchids. When he returned home, he pitched a research project documenting the orchids of Turkish cemeteries to his incoming Ph.D. student, Viktor Löki, who said “yes” immediately. “It was tops five minutes,” recalls Löki, now a biologist at the HUN-REN Centre for Ecological Research in Budapest and a co-author of the study.
The teams’ research quickly expanded beyond Turkey into the rest of Europe. By 2018, Löki and his colleagues had visited more than 2,600 cemeteries in Europe and Turkey. Their findings contribute to a growing body of research that suggests that cemeteries all over the world are biodiversity hotspots. In fact, cemeteries are some of the most biodiverse habitats in and near cities, says Jenő Nagy, study lead author and biologist at the University of Debrecen, Hungary.
The new study is the first-ever assessment of the conservation value of cemeteries on a continental scale. Fifteen percent of the graveyards surveyed contained orchids, and the researchers found 44,680 individual plants. “The fact that so many orchid species occur in European cemeteries was a surprise for me,” says Ingo Kowarik, a plant ecologist at Technische Universität Berlin in Germany.
During the five years Löki spent scouring graveyards for the odd-looking flowers, he saw a diversity of attitudes toward allowing scientists into cemeteries. In the mountainous north of Azerbaijan, “they were very supportive [of our research] and they said: ‘you do whatever you want,’” Löki recalls. But just a four-hour drive away in southern Azerbaijan, “people over there were very suspicious,” he says. They would approach us immediately, and when we answered their questions they would tell us to leave, he says.
The traditions of different cultures influence whether their cemeteries play host to orchids and other plants. Many religions prohibit building, farming, and resource extraction on burial grounds. But gravesite architecture matters, too. On the Mediterranean coast of Spain and France, orchids grew in just two of the 150 cemeteries surveyed. Rocky soils and local customs dictate that many bodies rest above ground in structures, such as mausoleums, Löki says. These masses of concrete and marble leave very little open soil where plants can grow, he says.
Some of the groundskeeping practices at cemeteries may also be more orchid-friendly than others, the researchers believe, although they did not have enough data to statistically test this idea. In some places, plants and animals lived largely undisturbed among the tombstones. Other cemeteries are frequently mowed and treated with pesticides to create a lush, green lawn at the expense of biodiversity, Nagy says.
Löki noticed that this kind of manicuring was much more common in Europe than in Turkey, where “they are rather interested in leaving nature alone for religious reasons,” he says. He is fascinated by the fortuitous overlap in this case between spirituality and conservation. The orchids, in any case, are sublime. 
Lead image: Ondrej Prosicky / Shutterstock
