ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 29, 1997 TAG: 9703310025
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURGI
SOURCE: MARK CLOTHIER THE ROANOKE TIMES
A week back, Jo Ann Lytton and her daughter Nicole set out to spruce up Jo Ann's grandmother's place.
Easter was coming, so the decorations had a pastel flavor. The Lyttons don't miss a holiday or a season when it comes to making their grandmother's Roselawn Memorial Gardens grave site look nice.
This particular day was windy, so they spent twenty minutes with a butcher knife digging a hole deep enough so the plastic pink and white cross with flowers would stay put.
Which it did until earlier last week.
The Lyttons didn't go by to check on things until Thursday, though, when they found the grave site, and the cemetery, looking rather plain.
Turns out, this was the week Roselawn Memorial Gardens does its spring seeding, said manager Terri Welch.
Welch said they've been thatching, seeding, fertilizing and aerating the cemetery lawn this time of year for three years, ever since a Philadelphia-based company, The Loewen Group, bought the 15-acre cemetery, which sits off U.S. 460, on a hill near New River Valley Mall.
To facilitate the job, workers clear the grave sites of any flowers or decoration.
Welch said the work this year was done on the Monday and Tuesday of the week before Easter so families could have the rest of the week to put fresh flowers at their loved ones' grave sites for Easter.
A full-page ad ran in a local paper, informing readers of the spring cleaning.
"We do this to benefit the families in the area, not to cause them any problems," Welch said. "The previous owners let the cemetery really go and we've put hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it looking like it does. And we plan to keep making this the best-looking cemetery in Montgomery County."
Still, Welch said she received so many phone calls from people who hadn't heard of the lawn project, she's ordered a $1,500 sign for next year to be placed in the cemetery's entrance.
The Lyttons wish the cemetery could have waited a week and better informed them this year. They said they'll head back out and redecorate their grandmother's grave site.
"If they wanted to reseed, couldn't they have waited a week?" Jo Ann Lytton said. "It's not the money. It's just the thought that you had someting out there for your grandmother and it looks now like there's nothing there."
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