A Man's Turf: The Perfect Lawn - Warren Schultz - Paperback

"I believe a blade of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars." --Walt Whitman,Leaves of Grass As I wrangle the power mower across the lawn on a Saturday morning, I can almost hear, above the roar of the engine, a small voice calling out plaintively: "How can you say you love me when you don't even know me?" No, it's not someone complaining from inside the house. It's not an argument overheard from next door. It's the voice of the lawn itself. And I have to admit, it has a strong basis for complaint. I know every inch of my property. I know where the buried ledge sticks up through the soil and chips the mower blade if I'm not careful. I know where the backyard stays boggy well into June. I have notes (somewhere) about the shrubs planted along the property line, including variety names and when they were planted and pruned. I study nursery catalogs and memorize tongue-twisting botanic names. I do my homework and know the best plants for the sun and shade and which will survive our frigid winters. But the grass under my feet--that's a different story. It remains a cipher. Even though I spend more time tending to my grass than I do to any other plant, I can only guess at the species of the grass in my lawn--or even how many different types there might be there. But there's one thing that I do know: Each grass plant is a marvel. Any single grass plant in my lawn may be ten, twenty, as much as fifty years old. There may be as many as eight to ten individual grass plants per square inch of turf, or 8 million in an average lawn. And what we see is only a small part of the plant. A little grass plant can produce more than three hundred miles of roots. And those grass plants work hard. They absorb pollution, catch rainfall, prevent erosion, cushion the ground, muffle noise, and manufacture oxygen. And they just keep growing. The grass plant is a survivor. We trod on it, roll on it, trample it, neglect it, scalp it--and it comes back. It withstands the winters of Alaska, the droughts of California, the searing heat and humidity of Florida. And it keeps coming back for more. Grass is a no-nonsense, bottom-line plant. Neither fussy nor temperamental, it gets the job done without calling attention to itself. And that earns our respect. We take comfort in the certainty that the lawn will green up in the spring, and that it will always need mowing. Maybe it's the resilient nature of the grass plant that causes us to admire the lawn so. We modern men can identify with it. We, too, are often clipped just when we think we're growing. Turf grass is a member of the ancient plant family Gramineae, which first appeared on earth during the Mesozoic Period, about 100 million years ago. Over the years more than 7,000 species evolved from this family, including wheat, rice, corn, and bamboo. The grass plant is also built to photosynthesize. Turf grasses are characterized by short, hollow stems and long leaves. The leaves, or blades, are much longer than their stems. If a maple tree had the same kind of configuration, each of its leaves would be as big as a house. Of course, that means that grasses are photosynthesizing powerhouses. In fact, when it comes to converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, grass plants are four times as efficient in this process as most trees. Meet the Grasses Though they all belong to the same family and look pretty much the same to us from behind the mower, turf grass species have many different characteristics, including growth habit, texture, and regional adaptability. Those attributes help to determine which species you should be growing in your lawn. Growth Habit Turf grasses are characterized as either sod-forming grasses or bunch grasses. A sod-forming grass, such as Kentucky bluegrass or Bermudagrass, spreads by stolons or rhizomes and knits itself into a strong carpet of sod, leSchultz, Warren is the author of 'A Man's Turf: The Perfect Lawn - Warren Schultz - Paperback' with ISBN 9780609805695 and ISBN 060980569X.