I got to see a lot of beautiful and interesting turfgrass around the world in 2022. I looked through my photos from the year and chose these as my favorites.
Before getting to the turf photos, though, I like to check where I went by air. There was so little air travel in 2020 and 2021 that I did not bother making a map for those years. It was a relatively busy year for travel in 2022—my 2019 flight map was 56 flights for 161,473 km, by comparison.
Now for the photos.
This is actually a capture from a video I took of cup cutting at Camiral during the Catalunya Championship. The bentgrass greens were superb; I wrote a blog post about the conditions that week.
I was surprised to find Stenotaphrum secundatum growing wild at the northern edge of the West Cliffs property in Portugal. I had also seen this grass on a hotel lawn in Porto, and in the Algarve, and in central Tokyo, and of course in Florida, earlier in the year.
I made my first trip to Tifton, Georgia. There’s a grass garden there—or should it be called a grass museum?—with the official grass material for famous varieties used all over the world.
I got a tip about a grass shipment happening one day in the Strait of Malacca. I chartered my own boat and went to take some photos. I ended up making this video about that day.
These are crucibles at Brookside Labs in New Bremen, Ohio, USA, used for the measurement of soil organic matter. I made a visit to the lab in March and learned more about the details of the testing procedures and sample processing.
In my runs around home in southern Thailand, I see plenty of Zoysia growing wild. This driveway provides a particularly good example of the dramatic effect of rolling on Zoysia appearance.
I saw the Rock of Gibraltar for the first time this year. I also saw some well-maintained Cynodon.
Another excursion into the Strait of Malacca brought me to a small island in the Andaman Sea with some monostands of fine-bladed Zoysia growing right up to the beach.
Zoysia matrella lawns in central Tokyo and pine trees glittering in the summer sun.
Near Copenhagen in July, I took a field trip at the International Turfgrass Research Conference that brought me to a grassed ski slope that is on top of a power plant. Extraordinary!
We’ve all heard about the courses in New Zealand that are grazed by sheep. In August, I stopped by Taihape Golf Course and saw one for myself.
There are two different varieties of fine-bladed Zoysia invading this Tifeagle green near Bangkok.
This lawn in Bangkok was planted more than a decade ago to Zoysia matrella. It is now primarily tropical carpetgrass — Axonopus compressus. I check this lawn when I am in Bangkok for species composition, and in 2022 I also checked for seasonal zoysia seedhead production and made some observations of leaf wetness.
Another beautiful morning at Camiral. Also, check the overlap on this half freaky doublecut.