The Edge September/October 2025

This core team also conducts prep work on the volunteer sites several days ahead to help enable individuals who aren’t as ac customed to field work to be as efficient as possible. At the FDR Memorial, this meant creating bed edges in advance. “Aaron (Engel) brought a team of four people, himself and three others, and they brought round mechanical edgers, and they edged all these beds and cleaned all these beds up,”Benoit says. “They had a lot of dead plant material, leaves, sticks. They went through every one of these beds and cleaned them out and put an edge on them for the first time.” Meanwhile at ANC, Lanier used a skid steer with an attachment to till up the planting beds. “Of course, the attachment broke, and so they had to do it by hand,”Benoit says. “It was a massive project. Those are some of the things that we had to do well in advance.” NALP is grateful to all the partners who allow Renewal & Remembrance to make a visible difference at these historic grounds. “NALP does a great job of doing way more behind the scenes to pull the strings to make these relationships happen,” Newman says. “There’s not a lot of people in their lifetime who are able to come down and volunteer at a national park or Arlington National Cemetery so I feel like that’s a gift that members should take advantage of.” TE

With the parking garage project, there was previously a hedgerow that had been there since the parking garage was built. “That was old and tired,” Gray says. “The design back then was different, and things are different now. So we’ve been working with that whole parking garage in general. So, getting rid of that barberry hedge, we’re trying to match it with what we’ve been doing with the rest of the parking garage, with a big berm in the middle. It’ll certainly add to the aesthetic down there when people first come in the cemetery.” Benoit says once the project list has been determined, they have to begin cal culating what is needed to execute them. They will conduct half-day meetings with ANC and NPS to determine the manhours, materials and tools required for the proj ects. Then, NALP begins working to secure tools and donations. “We’re spending a lot of time and social capital connecting with those people,” Benoit says. Benoit says once these are secured, they coordinate the deliveries of the equipment and materials over four to five days leading up to Renewal & Remembrance. For in stance, at ANC Benoit and Brandon Lanier had to unload a 54-foot tractor-trailer full of plants for two of the project locations. “We had to load them into a small trailer and then unload them again where the projects went,” Benoit says.

employees,”Newman says. “They really enjoy volunteering back home in our local community, so I just thought they really would enjoy this.” Newman says that respect is very important to him, and he knows his team members respect him for working along side them. “I want to make sure the guys know that I’m willing to get out there and work with them and do the hard work,”Newman says. The effort that goes into Renewal & Re membrance goes far beyond a single day. Bill Benoit, Renewal & Remembrance chair and VP of sales and marketing with The Integra Group, says they start conducting site visits in February to meet with ANC and NPS representatives to determine potential projects. Matthew Morrison, an arborist with the National Park Service, says they seek out work that they would like the volunteer landscape professionals to recreate or bolster. “This year, we chose the FDR Memorial because it’s such a fabulous site, and NALP likes to keep their team together in one location, and we knew that this site could accommodate every aspect of their profes sionalism,” Morrison says. Craig Gray, a horticulturist with Arlington National Cemetery, says they try to select projects based on the ease of getting people there as well as elements that may be difficult to cover in a contract.

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