Barre — Much of the once well-manicured lawn at Hope Cemetery is dead, and it won’t be an overnight task to restore it.
Often considered an open-air museum, Vale’s premier cemetery is now the epicenter of the 2023 Great War of Grab.
So far the larvae are winning, but not even close. Assistance is improving, but hopes that at least some of the damage can be repaired by Memorial Day have given way to more realistic projections.
“This is going to be a project that will last all summer,” Jeff Bergeron said Monday.
Bergeron, the city’s director of building and social services, is as frustrated as anyone by the epidemic, which began late last summer and is believed to have come back in full swing this spring.
“There’s not a lot of green grass out there,” Bergeron said, even as Pete McTeigue rode his zero-turn mower to fix patches of grass that still remained at Hope.
Those parcels are so tiny that McTeigue’s task is a little more difficult than roaming a 65-acre cemetery without avoiding vast stretches of barren land where larvae are gnawing at the grassroots.
This includes most of the vast lawn in front of the cemetery, where some of Valle’s greatest masterpieces are located, and intricate carvings befitting a city that calls itself the ‘Granite Capital of the World’. A monument decorated with
Crows and skunks didn’t help. Both feed on larvae every night, so they do not have a noticeable effect on population numbers, but they do dig up a fair amount of soil.
“It just makes it look worse,” said Bergeron, suggesting the larvae don’t need any help in that regard.
“It’s amazing what these little bugs can do,” he said.
Hope Cemetery has never been without larvae. I have. But Bergeron said past problems involved relatively small areas and were easier to treat.
“I’ve had grub problems before, but usually a little patch here, or a little patch there. Nothing too big. Almost every patch of the cemetery is affected. ‘ said Bergeron. Some sections have suffered more damage than others, but none are as bad as some sections of Route 14, the highly visible vestibules that run along Bare’s Maple He Avenue.
Bergeron said areas on either side of the cemetery’s main entrance and an oval island just beyond where the flagpole is located will be sprayed and eventually reseeded by True Green workers next week. . Bergeron said the hope is that the treatment will kill the soon-to-be hatched larvae, allowing those areas to be fertilized and reseeded before focusing on other parts of the cemetery.
“We are following the instructions of the experts,” he said.
Addressing the common areas facing the road first is easier than working between monuments where the damage is less noticeable but still needs to be addressed.
It may take some time. Bergeron said some areas could be cured until next spring, depending on how things unfold and the success of the proposed attack plan.
He noted that some people had inquired about the issue and said, “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
The first visible sign that something was wrong was last fall, when Bergeron said the cause was unclear and the problem was significant but not alarming.
“It’s never been as bad as it is now,” he says.
When the snow melted earlier this year, Bergeron said he believed the discoloration that appeared along the highway was caused by a winter’s worth of road salt sprayed on Route 14. He said the grass in that area and elsewhere never recovered, and when the problem spread, it quickly became clear that this was not the case.
Bergeron said the person he spoke to at True Green said Barré was never alone.
“This is the worst spring he’s ever seen in terms of larval infestation,” he said.