Landscape Architect Articles

Dealing With The Seasons, Gracefully01-01-05 | News

Dealing With The Seasons, Gracefully

By Joe Casavant,
Gracelawn Memorial Park

This view shows the Garden of Masters with a statue of Jesus in the background after a winter snowfall. The cherry tree at right will emerge in a brief, riotous bloom in early spring.

Temperature and precipitation are factors that are never far from the minds of Gracelawn Memorial Park?EUR??,,????'???s maintenance team. Working in Delaware, the team knows that snow, frozen and soggy ground can challenge most routine maintenance procedures throughout the year.

?EUR??,,????'??We are committed to providing the highest quality interment services and perpetual care, respecting those interred, while providing the best possible memories for their families.?EUR??,,????'??

So reads the mission statement at Gracelawn, an 80-acre flat-bronze marker memorial park in New Castle, Del. Established in 1935, it remains, with pride, a family-owned enterprise into the second generation with plans to welcome the third as its future owners and caretakers. With over 32,000 gravesites, and averaging 800 burials each year, perpetual maintenance is the crew?EUR??,,????'???s somewhat-daunting responsibility and promise.

?EUR??,,????'??The similarity to the golf course business is amazing,?EUR??,,????'?? says Joe Casavant, Gracelawn?EUR??,,????'???s current superintendent who has spent more than 10 years maintaining and renovating courses throughout Pennsylvania and Delaware. ?EUR??,,????'??You have to provide a service, create and maintain esthetics, and interact with the public. We use much of the same equipment from tractors to slit seeders and sprayers, and personnel requirements are similar. Nine full-time, including an assistant and mechanic, three part time, and three to six seasonal workers complete the staff.?EUR??,,????'??

One difference, however, is that golf courses concentrate on the turf while at cemeteries turf may be secondary to the care of trees, shrubs, and landscape beds. The factor that raises the majority of the park?EUR??,,????'???s maintenance challenges is Mother Nature, however. Everything we do, how we do it and when, is based on the forecast for the day, the week and the next month. The team has to concern itself not just with what?EUR??,,????'???s above ground, but the conditions it may encounter up to seven feet below.

Saturated Ground

The biggest challenge, surprisingly, is the often-saturated soil we encounter from late November through spring. Because of the use of heavy equipment such as backhoes, dump trucks and cranes, we could easily rut up the turf not to mention the pressure on the bronze memorial plaques, pushing them down or tilting them. We are therefore forced to ?EUR??,,????'??board-in?EUR??,,????'?? the equipment. This requires an extra board trailer, tow vehicle and workers. A combination of regular four-by-eight-foot plywood sheets as well as the new fiberglass/plastic one-half size boards seem to work the best.

The new 32-inch half lawn boards weighing 35 to 45 pounds are easily handled and do not gain weight when wet like regular plywood. They are very expensive but last for years. We are now on our fourth year of trial, a duration plywood could not match. Times and situations still call for the full plywood sheets for short-radius turning and rigidity but we continue to build up our lawn board inventory annually.

Luis Bermudez?EUR??,,????'??+a full time maintenance crew member - looking into a massive cave-in due to very wet ground. Workers will cover the grave and create a ?EUR??,,????'??false setup?EUR??,,????'?? for the funeral ceremony and fill the irregular hole in when visitors have left.

Saturated ground also presents the possibility of overnight grave-hole cave-ins. This can also happen during or after heavy rainfalls. If no vault was installed, then the crew will just re-excavate. However, many times the vaults have been installed soon after digging with the lids removed. If a soaker occurs, or the soil is very wet, then cave-ins are quite frequent. If a vault fills with soil, it can take one or more hours to clean it out while the scheduled funeral service time quickly approaches.

With rain forecast overnight, the team has learned to leave the lids on in case of just such an occurrence. Then workers only have to clean off the lid and remove it, revealing a clean vault that is ready for its casket.

Frozen Ground and Snow

When the ground lightly freezes in December, the team can abandon the labor-intensive ?EUR??,,????'??boarding-in.?EUR??,,????'?? However, things can quickly approach another challenge. As the ground freezes, the team switches to frost teeth on the backhoe buckets for a one to two-inch frost line. An electric jackhammer can break a two-to-three inch crust, but beyond that, a 60-pound hammer and compressor are required to break through the three-by-eight foot area. Depending on the soil type, the frozen depth has varied up to 18-inches before a worker can excavate with a hoe.

Dan Smith is getting ready to snow blow a path from an access road out to a tent for an upcoming funeral service. Gracelawn can have close to 300 winter ceremonies each season.

Snow can be helpful as well as a hindrance. It makes a great insulator to prevent freezing and to ease excavation. However, in addition to plowing the roads, office areas, and mausoleum sidewalks, crews must also clear paths to new graves as well as create walkways for tented funeral services. All snow must be cleared from under each 15-by-20-foot tent before carpets and lowering devises can be installed.

Laying out the grave can be a chore in any amount of snow or ice. Since the park is laid out in a grid system, we follow detailed maps to locate our exact plot. What is normally a 15 or 20-minute job can take a half hour or more depending on the conditions. One needs to remove the snow from several memorials for referencing and if covered with ice, we must chip it off in order to read it. The large, buried galvanized nails that mark lots, as well as other reference markers, must also be located. This can be very difficult in snow and it can be impossible with frozen ground. All grave locations are double-checked, or ?EUR??,,????'??seconded,?EUR??,,????'?? before excavation, and the team sometimes does a third confirmation under the most difficult conditions.

This Ford 550 backhoe is using its front-end loader to clear the park?EUR??,,????'???s access roads after a 28-inch snowfall. The backhoe is one of two in use at the cemetery.

Snow and ice also require the laying out of additional carpets from memorial service tents to access roads to provide safe footing for the pallbearers and the funeral processions. This could be from a few feet to over 100 feet, detouring around hundreds of seasonal decorations.

Moving our tents in heavy snow also can be tough and on rare occasions impossible. Four-wheel-drive vehicles, tractors and sometimes the backhoes have been used to move them.

Leaf removal is not too difficult except that Mother Nature can seem to hang on to them past our own deadlines. The crews usually start pickup in October, but the bulk of the work comes in November. The leaves should be removed before Thanksgiving but the last 25 to 30 percent can seem to hang in there until that date. All must be removed before Dec. 1, giving crews just a week before the Christmas decorations begin to accumulate, rendering leaf removal almost impossible.

The public as well as the staff can have difficulty locating graves due to leaf clutter. The team takes advantage of every weather window to blow the leaves into wind rows with a large three-point-hitch blower. They are then removed with a tractor-pulled leaf vac and a large gasoline-powered sweeper. All family plots and mulch beds are raked by hand and then sucked up with a smaller leaf vac. Additional temporary help is usually brought in to aid with this task.

Memorial installation is also affected by the same factors mentioned above for the excavation and filling of graves. Once again the weather dictates the scheduling and affects production.

So when golf course workers are taking it a little easier in the winter, we find ourselves in the opposite mode. Late fall, winter and early spring can become our challenging times.

It is no wonder we look forward to late spring and summer. We can find our grave locations, put the lawn boards away for the season, excavate with relative ease, and view the leaves where they belong?EUR??,,????'??+on the trees! This is not to say that spring is low maintenance. It is one of the busiest times?EUR??,,????'??+involving pruning, edging, mulching, mowing, planting, seeding, weeding and insect control.

A rough calculation for weed-eating around Gracelawn?EUR??,,????'???s memorials yields a total of 270 miles of edging, which requires three people working for four weeks to complete the job. Only, of course, to start again and repeat the task five to six times a season depending on soil moisture. We are considering experimenting with turf growth regulators in the summer of 2005.

One thing that affects the property?EUR??,,????'???s maintenance is the fact that funeral services are occurring on an almost daily basis, six days a week from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Just as golf course staffers must be aware of golfers as they play through, we must be constantly mindful of the services taking place and try to schedule the day?EUR??,,????'???s activities while keeping downtime to a minimum. Excavation, weed-eating, memorial placement, leaf blowing and many other activities could disrupt what is always an emotional event. In some cases, we do shut down activity until the service has concluded.

Gracelawn superintendent Joe Casavant says he often tells people that cemeteries are for the living, not for the dead. Since the park is open all day throughout the year, workers are interrupted every day to render assistance, to find a grave, or to talk about a patron?EUR??,,????'???s late friend or loved one. The workers are not counselors, but they do take the time just to listen and help visitors out.

Memorial parks are a unique business to work in. It can be just a job to the crews, but workers have to keep in mind why the public is here, understand their emotions and respect the moment. Most people are completely unaware of the work it takes to open, set up, and close a funeral service or the preparation and care it takes to install a memorial marker.

If Gracelawn?EUR??,,????'???s workers continue to provide the best interment services and maintain the park at the highest standards with reverence and respect, then the team will have fulfilled the park?EUR??,,????'???s demanding mission statement.