5 Native Grasses for a Luscious Lawn
-- book excerpt --
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It is possible to have a great-looking lawn without hours of mowing, watering, weeding, and reseeding--think native! Native grasses are far easier to care for than conventional high-maintenance turf.
Understanding the growth habits of grasses will help you understand how to grow and manage them successfully. Cool-season grasses grow best in spring and fall and stay green into winter, but go dormant and turn brown in summer without prodigious amounts of water. Warm-season grasses do most of their growing in the hot summer, and go dormant when cold weather arrives. Most warm-season grasses have a bunching habit, and so need to be seeded heavily for a thick sod.
Following are five beautiful, carefree native alternatives to conventional turfgrass.
- Buffalograss (Buchloe dactyloides) has prospered on the Great Plains for centuries. This native grass is a sod-forming species and uses water efficiently, having adapted over thousands of years to the periodic and prolonged droughts characteristic of the region. A warm-season grass, it is naturally short (4 to 6 inches high), so no mowing is required.
- Red fescue (Festuca rubra) grows slowly and if left uncut reaches a mature height of only 8 to 12 inches. It doesn't like a lot of fertilizer, and thrives in dry, infertile soil. It tolerates not only partial shade but also drought. In fact, irrigation and fertilizer actually restrict its development. A cool-season bunchgrass, it greens up early in the spring and is evergreen in some situations. Red fescue can withstand the col of northerly climes and the heat of the upper South.
- Pennsylvania sedge (Carex pensylvanica), like all sedges, is a close botanical cousin of the grasses and looks a lot like them. It is widely distributed throughout the eastern and central U.S. Its creeping foliage forms dense mats of medium-green, fine-textured foliage growing 6 to 8 inches when left unmowed.
- Junegrass (Koeleria macrantha) prefers sandy or thin, gravelly soil--soil that tends to be dry and not very fertile. In fact, fertilizing junegrass is not only unnecessary but can be downright detrimental. And this native grass is very drought-tolerant. A bunchgrass, it is found in prairie, open woods, and sandy soil from Ontario south to Louisiana and west to California.
- Little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium) is a warm-season bunchgrass that is native throughout most of the U.S. and Canada. Like other warm-season grasses, it is fairly tolerant of poor soil, and therefore needs no fertilizer. It also requires no irrigation once established. Little bluestem makes an especially handsome low-maintenance lawn when mixed with other native grasses such as Pennsylvania sedge and tufted hairgrass (Deschampia flexuosa).
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This article was excerpted from Easy Lawns: Low Maintenance Native Grasses for Gardeners
Everywhere, (c) 1999 by Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1000 Washington Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11225,
(718)623-7200.
Used with permission.
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