lawns

I was passing through Corvallis and stopped to meet Tom Cook, who maintains his primarily bentgrass lawn with the greatest of care. Or is it neglect? He has not applied fertilizer to the lawn in 15 years, irrigates during the summer dry period only enough to keep the grass green, mows weekly, hand pulls the most egregious weeds, interseeds with white clover, and even keeps an unirrigated strip of turf in which one can find rat’s-tail fescue (Vulpia myuros).

I see a lot of grass in driveways, parks, lawns, and fields when I run around southern Thailand. And because I can’t run very fast, and I happen to be curious about grasses, I get a pretty good look at what is growing.

I noticed something interesting on the lawn of a resort at Ko Kood earlier this month. Looking down from the “Beware of falling coconuts” signs, I noticed that the southern section of lawn was primarily seashore paspalum, and that section of lawn was infested with a variety of weeds.

This is an interesting story about a common grass that rarely appears in a lawn as just a single species – as a monostand. But at an especially high profile location in Bangkok, the lawns are almost pure javagrass (Polytrias indica).

There are a variety of grasses used for lawns and sports turf in central Thailand. I gave a presentation last week at the American Society for Horticultural Science annual meeting about the growth of three of those grasses:

Frank Rossi and I wrote this article about the Park Grass experiment. This experiment has been ongoing since 1856. It involves fertilizer treatments applied to grassland and the many measurements that have been made over the years on the experimental plots.