INDUSTRY NEWS PLANET Day on the Hill: Giving Back

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Approximately 250 lawn care and landscape professionals and industry suppliers and manufacturers shut down their businesses July 24 to attend the Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) Renewal & Remembrance event. They volunteered their time and skills to improve the grounds of two historic sites – Arlington National and Historic Congressional cemeteries. 

The workers, who were split into more than 20 groups organized by crew leaders, did a variety of tasks, including lime applications, weed control, turf aeration, irrigation installation, tree pruning and cabling, mulching and tree, shrub and plant installation – all amidst the cemeteries’ normal schedules, which including tours as well as 27 funerals at Arlington National, which is the 612-acre final resting place of more than 200,000 veterans and their dependents.

PLANET President John Gibson says the industry has contributed more than $1 million over the past 10 years and $204,000 this year alone to the cemeteries through Renewal & Remembrance. “Our work is a gift to two great American monuments and a gift to the American people,” he says. “By giving we give back to American heroes and their families. By working together we can make a huge difference.”