UVA Today

After Saturday’s ceremonies, landscapers had to prepare for the same experience on Sunday, filling some areas where water had pooled with mulch and stones.

“There wasn’t much we could do on Saturday because it was still steadily raining,” Hopkins said. “On Sunday, with no rain predicted, we put mulch down in all the mud puddles that we could find, or any place that was really soft we covered in mulch to lessen the amount of mud that was coming up under people’s chairs and down the walkway.”

The double-shredded hardwood mulch they deployed on Sunday only added to their workload Monday, as landscapers had to remove the mulch from the Lawn before reseeding it. “Now we’ve got to get all of that mulch off, because that is going to kill the grass and be a headache to us,” Hopkins said.

Landscapers will reseed the Lawn with rye grass, which will germinate in seven days and be plainly visible in another seven days.

“It’s a perennial array, a blend specifically used on athletic fields,” Hopkins said. “It’s a little more resilient and takes a beating. We’re going to be right on the edge of having newly seeded grass coming up in time for the first Reunions Weekend, but if not the first weekend of Reunions, then certainly the second Reunions Weekend it will be doing even better.”

After Reunions, in the summer, landscapers will seed Bermuda grasses on the Lawn to get a better warm-season mixture.

Among the tools the landscapers use is a lawn mower-mounted blower to raise the grass where it has been matted down.

“It’s just trying to break the bond between the walked-on grass and the mud and get it to stand up in some capacity so that we can mow it,” Hopkins said.

Once the Lawn is cleared of chairs, cleaned of mulch and reseeded, Hopkins said that nature will do the rest.

“Once we get the chairs off and get sunshine on the Lawn, time will help,” he said. “We’ve got a good week of warm, warm, dry weather.”

And if it rains later, as is forecast later this week, that will help germinate the rye seed.

“Rain won’t slow us down. It’ll actually help us,” Hopkins said. “Mother Nature does a much better job watering than the irrigation system ever can. She gets every corner of it, which will help our seeds. And we will have the new seed down by then, so it will be more moisture for that.”

While working with the Lawn this weekend, Hopkins said landscapers identified some spots where they might install some additional drains to prevent water from collecting.

Hopkins does not worry about foot traffic disrupting what the landscapers are doing.

“It’s not really an issue. The students are gone. There are a few groups that are still wandering around, and the tourists are certainly still here, but they’re not going to have an impact,” he said. “We try to restrict access to the Lawn as little as we can. It’s five acres and people can spread out. They don’t tend to walk in the same place the way they do on graduation day.”