Episode 04: The Poet of Cemeteries - How Memorial Grounds Become Places of Healing
In Conversation with Florence Jaquet: Founder and Director of FJLA (Florence Jaquet Landscape Architecture)
About the episode:
Most of us would rather walk past a cemetery than into one. In this episode of Cities of Tomorrow, we go inside with Florence Jaquet, the “poet of cemeteries” and one of Australia’s foremost authorities on cemetery landscape design.
Born in Paris and trained in France and Switzerland, Florence has spent nearly four decades in Australia reshaping how we think about our most sacred public spaces. She shares how a university project she never chose became a lifelong calling, why grief is a process rather than a single moment, and how planting, scale, art and even music can help people move from sorrow towards remembrance.
We also talk about designing a memorial space for grieving parents and siblings, the thinking behind Macarthur Memorial Park in south-west Sydney, working with families in Mongolia, and why Australia’s commitment to burial “in perpetuity” may be running out of room. Florence doesn’t just design places to bury people. She designs places that help the living understand what it means to be alive.
Key topics:
- From a garden near Versailles to cemetery design: how a childhood among orchards, and a university project she didn’t choose, shaped her career.
- Lessons from Europe: Swiss cemeteries that protect groundwater, renewable grave tenure, and France’s bold public parks.
- Designing for grief: human scale, privacy, the cycle of life in planting, and the role of art and music.
- A children’s memorial space: chalk walls, message trees and a layout based on an unfurling fern frond, so siblings can grieve at their own pace.
- Macarthur Memorial Park: fitting a major new cemetery lightly into rolling hills, with wetlands, walking tracks, a café, and First Nations and historical interpretation.
- Green burial and perpetuity: why current laws make it hard to share burial space, and how Western Australia and South Australia do it differently.
- Mongolia: working with a nomadic, Buddhist and shamanic culture where families bury their own dead.
- One thing to take away: talking with your family about how you want to return to the earth.
About the guest:
Florence Jaquet is the Principal of FJLA (Florence Jaquet Landscape Architect) and one of Australia’s foremost specialists in cemetery planning and design, with expertise in water sensitive urban design.
Born in Paris, the daughter of a Swiss cabinetmaker and a French artist, Florence grew up near Versailles. She studied horticulture in Lille and landscape architecture in Geneva, and worked in Switzerland, England and France before moving to Australia in 1987. Her university thesis tested the drainage water collected beneath Swiss cemeteries, an early start to a career spent bringing ecology and grief into the same landscape.
Over nearly four decades in Australia, Florence has worked with cemetery trusts on master plans and memorial landscapes, including work on the children’s section at Springvale and the design of Macarthur Memorial Park in Varroville, Sydney’s first new Crown cemetery in 80 years, which opened in 2025. She has also worked in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is a long-standing member of the Australasian Cemeteries and Crematoria Association (ACCA), and continues to advocate for legislative reform to make burial in Australia more sustainable.
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