Turfgrass breeders are always on the lookout for the next new grass variety, perhaps the next breakthrough or even the next "great" or "superlative" grass. But the search for improved turfgrass varieties is not undertaken without some thought toward the end result.

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At the University of Florida, a team of researchers has developed four new turfgrass varieties, including UltimateFlora Zoysia, Hammock Centipede, PristineFlora Zoysia and Aloha Seashore Paspalum. These varieties are the result of nearly a seven-year research effort that included plant breeders, agronomists, plant physiologists and entomologists. Over the course of the development period, lesser breeding lines were tested and dropped from the breeding program. These four elite breeding lines survived the "winnowing" process and ultimately became the four cultivars that met the criteria defined at the beginning of the process.

In other words, these cultivars were bred for a purpose based on a set of breeding objectives delineated at the outset of the program.

The process began with the general goal of creating new grasses that could, at one extreme, replace existing varieties but more realistically provide sod growers and consumers with a set of alternative grass varieties that would be easier to manage and maintain.

Author Brian Scully talks about Aloha Seashore Paspalum at a field day held last fall at the Emerald Island Turf farm in Avon Park, Fla.

In the case of residential lawn grasses, our purpose was to develop one or more cultivars that could help diversify the Florida landscape environment, which is presently dominated by Floratam St. Augustine. In actuality, St. Augustinegrass was originally used as a forage grass, and Floratam was derived from that germplasm base. However, it was bred to have a more refined growth habit that was better suited and adapted to the landscape. By some standards, St Augustine grasses are coarse textured, and many Florida residents who have moved here from Northern states remark that the St. Augustinegrass in their yards looks like the crabgrass they used to kill out of their lawns up north. This is perhaps unfair to a grass that has served our industry so well for so long, but unfortunately perception often usurps reality.

Aesthetic reasons alone were not sufficient motivation to seek an alternative to St. Augustinegrass. The real impetus was to enlarge the array of grass varieties in the marketplace and to find a set of adapted genotypes within warm-season turf species that were hopefully more pleasing and required less care. For example, centipedegrass and zoysiagrass are generally known to require less maintenance than either bermudagrass or St Augustinegrass. In Florida, where population growth is a matter of great concern, we must be diligent about the conservation and use of our water resources. In some communities such as Volusia County, Fla., residents are issued $25 fines for violating water restriction guidelines, reports the Daytona News-Journal. Water restrictions are commonplace in Florida and the continued reliance on a single species or a single cultivar within that species may be imprudent, particularly if it requires heavy water use. Historically, continual monocultures eventually developed problems. The breakdown of resistance to chinch bugs in certain varieties of St. Augustinegrass is a familiar example. Routine chemical treatments are now required to maintain superior turf quality in chinch bug-infested regions.

We believed there should be a wider set of choices for warm-season lawns. Of the many breeding lines we tested, two lines seemed to routinely stand out from the others and met our selection criteria. The first is Ultimate Flora Zoysia, a new medium-textured genotype of zoysiagrass taxonomically known as Zoysia japonica Stued. It is essentially a "Meyer-type" zoysiagrass with some distinct differences. Ultimate has a finer-textured leaf blade than either Meyer or the more recently developed Empire zoysiagrass. In comparison to the standard St. Augustine variety Floratam, all of the current zoysiagrasses have a more refined texture. And surprisingly, Ultimate felt softer to the touch.