Cemetery Turf Best Management Practices Guide

Abstract

This project will develop a turf management guide for historic cemeteries. The need for this type of turf management guidance is unique given the intersection of turf and grave markers, but this will many components of this work will help inform turf management anywhere monuments and buildings intersect with turf. Turf management practices can be damaging to grave markers either physically, with mowing and trimming equipment; chemically, with pesticides and fertilizers; or with irrigation layout, practices, and water quality.

This effort will require examination of existing documentation and management practices to develop a manual for turf care within the context of protecting cemetery monuments. It will also identify blind spots in our knowledge that will guide further research into turf care. This project, by using science and research to provide best practices for turf care without damaging cemetery monuments, also will inform maintenance plans in other cultural landscapes where stone or other building materials interface with turf.

Personnel

Bob Page

Bob Page is the Director of the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. He has led the Center for the past twenty-one years. His responsibilities include developing, implementing, and overseeing a comprehensive landscape preservation program that includes research, planning, stewardship and education, and technology development. Bob directly manages and supervises eight professional staff members and an annual budget of $1.7 million. Prior to assuming this position, Bob served for ten years as the program manager for the NPS Cultural Landscapes Program in Washington, DC. He was involved with the development of policies, programs, and standards for cultural landscape management in the national park system. Bob is a graduate of the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He was inducted as a Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2007.

Michael Stachowicz

Michael Stachowicz is the Program Manager at the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation. With thirty years of turf experience in private sector and the National Park Service, Michael has worked to improve landscape maintenance techniques in the park service through training, research, introduction of new technologies, and contract management.

Michael’s first job in the National Park Service was to be project manager the reconstruction of the National Mall, a $44 million project to make Mall turf more reliable and sustainable. That effort included developing an Operations and Maintenance Guide for the Mall and engaging in a public education program on the new management approaches to the Mall. Michael is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts with a degree in Plant and Soil Sciences.

Dennis Montagna

Dennis Montagna is the Program Manager of the National Park Service’s Monument Research & Preservation Program. Based at the National Park Service’s Northeast Region Office in Philadelphia, the program provides comprehensive assistance in the interpretation and care of historic cemeteries, outdoor sculpture and public monuments to managers of National Park sites and to other constituents nationwide.

Past projects include preservation planning and conservation for sculpture collections for the Gettysburg and Vicksburg Battlefields, the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area, and Keweenaw NHP. He has assisted historic cemeteries with a wide range of conservation and preservation training projects. These include Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and The Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. He helped plan the conservation response to the 2017 vandalism at Mount Carmel Jewish Cemetery in Philadelphia, and advised Arlington National Cemetery on the conservation of the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Dennis’ work has also included the creation of new memorials. He chaired the federal review panel that selected a design for the African Burial Ground Memorial at the burial site of thousands of enslaved and free Africans in lower Manhattan. With sculptor Jim Barnhill, and on a much smaller scale, he designed the memorial placed at Booker T. Washington’s birthplace near Roanoke, Virginia. Since 2014, he has been writing and designing bronze plaques presented to National Historic Landmark stewards.

Dennis holds a BA degree in Studio Art from Florida State University, a Master’s degree in Art History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Ph.D from the University of Delaware. He participated in the 1989 ICCROM Architectural Conservation Course in Rome, Italy with grants from the Kress and Getty Foundations, and in subsequent years has returned to Rome as a course instructor. He is a former chair of the American Institute for Conservation’s Architecture Specialty Group and served as an advisor to the national Save Outdoor Sculpture! Project. He serves on the board of the Association for Gravestone Studies and was the 2018 recipient of that organization’s Harriette Merrifield Forbes Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Gravestone Studies.