Sposato Landscape volunteers tend to Arlington Cemetery

They fell at Gettysburg, The Somme and Midway. They bled at Pork Chop Hill and Khe Sanh. Later they died at Kandahar and Fallujah. They now rest in straight, neat rows at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia. Arlington Cemetery has been the final resting place for many American heroes since the Civil War.

Amongst its most famous are John, Robert and Ted Kennedy; Congressional Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy; Gen. George Patton; Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers; and pilot Jimmy Doolittle. All lie beneath the pearly white headstones, planted in grass as lush and green as a golf course.

But the beautiful landscape is no accident. It takes an army of professional landscapers to keep it pristine. And every year a group of volunteer landscapers from Sposato’s Landscape in Milton helps others from around the country lend a hand to keep it that way. It’s part of the Remembrance and Renewal at Arlington National Cemetery, sponsored by the Professional Landcare Network, also known as Planet.

“We’ve been involved with this program for over 15 years,” said Sposato founder Tony Sposato. “It’s our largest public service outreach activity. We want to support our veterans and armed forces, and this is a great way to do that. It probably comes out to about $10,000 a year in free landscape materials and services.”

Planet organizes hundreds of landscape, lawn-care and tree-care companies from across the nation to spend the day mulching, pruning, liming, planting, and aerating the cemetery. The day began with a ceremony featuring a color guard and speaker presentations that dedicated the day of work to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

This year, Sposato’s crew of four joined more than 400 other landscaping volunteers tending the grounds. Steve Baker, a Sposato turf applicator and Coast Guard veteran, spent the day applying lime, a soil amendment, to a 25-acre section of the cemetery. “It was special to be able to work around those who made the ultimate sacrifice,” he said.

Employee Travis Shalaby, who was in ROTC in high school, was able to visit the graves of two people he knew. The first was the daughter of his ROTC instructor, who was a captain in the Signal Corps First Armored Division, who died in a skiing accident. The second was a Marine lance corporal he knew in high school who died in Iraq. “That was overwhelming,” said Shalaby. “When I was at his grave, a funeral procession with a horse-drawn carriage was going by. It was very tearful. It really made what Sposato is doing here make sense. It felt very patriotic. I think people in this country take so many things for granted.”