40 Fun Facts About Lawn Care

Lawn grass survives weekly mowing because each blade grows from which part, a trait evolved to cope with grazing?

The base is the growth point of a grass blade, unlike most plants, which lengthen from stem tips. That is why a lawn can be cut or grazed again and again without severe damage.

Which lawn grass that carries the name of an American state is native to nearly all of Europe and northern Asia?

Kentucky bluegrass grows blue flower heads if left uncut, reaching two to three feet tall. About 90% of American seed for it is raised on farms in Idaho, Oregon and Washington.

The club that stages Wimbledon began in 1868 devoted to which lawn game, still named in its official title?

Croquet was the club's founding sport, and a single lawn was set aside for tennis only in 1875. The older game was dropped from the club's name in 1882, then restored in 1899 for sentimental reasons.

Which yellow-flowered lawn weed takes its English name from a French phrase likening its jagged leaves to teeth?

Dandelion comes from the French dent de lion, lion's tooth. The common species is no native of American lawns: it was introduced from Europe.

Which kitsch lawn ornament did sculptor Don Featherstone design in 1957 for Union Products of Leominster, Massachusetts?

Pink flamingo number one was named Diego by its designer, and it became a pop culture icon that won him the Ig Nobel Prize for Art in 1996.

The artificial lawn first sold as ChemGrass took its famous brand name in 1966 from which Houston stadium?

Astrodome use in 1966 was the product's first well-publicized outing, and a company employee, John A. Wortmann, rebranded it AstroTurf. It had been patented only a year earlier.

Lawn grasses share the plant family Poaceae with which woody giant, strong enough to be built into scaffolding?

Bamboo is a true grass, even though its woody stems can grow as tall as trees. The same family also gives us wheat, barley and oats.

Which hidden barrier let English country estates keep grazing livestock off the lawn without anything spoiling the view?

A ha-ha is a sunken ditch with a wall on one side, and its name comes from the cry of surprise visitors gave on coming across it. The French term was in print by 1709.

Which children's spring event has been a White House South Lawn tradition since President Hayes welcomed it in 1878?

Easter Egg Roll crowds came to the White House after an 1876 roll wrecked much of the Capitol's lawn and Congress barred children from playing on its grounds.

Which three-leaved plant is often added to lawn seed mixes because bacteria in its roots pull fertilizer from the air?

White clover fixes nitrogen in its root nodules, and it stays green in poorer soils where turf grasses struggle. That also helps it out-compete weeds in organic lawn care.

Which tunnelling mammal ruins lawns by raising heaps of soil while it hunts earthworms, not grass roots?

A mole can paralyse earthworms with a toxin in its saliva and store them alive in underground larders. Researchers have found larders holding more than a thousand worms.

What do lawn experts call the tangled layer of dead and living stems that builds up between grass and soil?

Thatch is about 25% lignin, a tough polymer that resists decay, which is why it piles up. Grass clippings are not to blame, since soil microbes break them down easily.

At which time of day do turf scientists advise running lawn sprinklers, as part of watering deeply but rarely?

Morning is the time experts recommend, along with one deep soak a week or less. Infrequent watering encourages deeper roots and better drought tolerance.

A standard mowing rule says to remove no more than what fraction of a grass blade's height in a single cut?

One third is the limit turf scientists give, because scalping stresses the plant. Taller grass also shades out weed seeds and keeps the soil cooler.

What survival state has a lawn entered when summer heat turns it the colour of straw but it greens up again later?

Dormancy cuts a grass plant's demand for water, so a parched-looking summer lawn can simply be resting. Grasses do the same in cold weather outside their preferred temperature range.

The British charity Plantlife asks gardeners to lock away the lawn mower for which whole month to help pollinators?

May is the month, and the campaign is called No Mow May. Leaving a lawn uncut increases plant diversity and lets its flowers produce nectar for insects.

Which annual lawn weed, a single plant of which can drop 150,000 seeds, dies each autumn leaving bare patches?

Crabgrass seeds sprout in late spring in the very gaps the dead plants left the year before. It does best in thin lawns that are lightly watered, underfed and poorly drained.

Which postwar New York suburb gave each of its 17,000 mass-built homes a lawn, reseeded free by the builders in 1948?

Levittown made the lawn its most prominent feature, and the firm's founder wrote that nothing added as much charm to a suburb as well-kept grass. Its houses went up between 1947 and 1951.

Which desert city, supplied from Lake Mead, has paid residents since 1999 to swap lawn grass for desert landscaping?

Las Vegas and its neighbours had converted 250 million square feet of lawn by 2026, saving more than 200 billion gallons of water. Outdoor watering is the biggest use of the area's supply.

Since 2001, the courts of the Wimbledon tennis championships have been sown entirely with which single lawn grass?

Perennial ryegrass took over from a blend that had been only 70% rye, with a red fescue making up the rest.

Which warm-season turf, common on southern US golf courses, is an invasive weed in the very place it is named for?

Bermuda grass is really native to Europe, Africa, Australia and much of Asia, and Australians call it couch grass. It recovers quickly from damage, which suits it to sports fields.

Which warm-climate lawn turf is usually planted as plugs or sprigs because viable seed was long unavailable?

St. Augustine grass knits into a turf so dense that it crowds out most weeds and other grasses. In the wild it turns up in lagoons, marshes and along shorelines.

Which fine-leaved grass is the turf of many golf putting greens and fairways in the northern United States?

Creeping bentgrass was an early target of genetic engineering: in the 1990s two companies set out to make it resistant to a weedkiller.

Which low-water lawn turf is a true North American native that grows wild on the High Plains shortgrass prairie?

Buffalo grass plants tend to be single-sex, so breeders have produced pollen-free cultivars for lawns. Its roots are finer than those of most plains grasses, under a millimetre thick.

Which lawn treatment uses hollow tines to pull small plugs of soil from the turf and relieve compaction?

Core aeration leaves holes that stay open for a long time, letting air, fertiliser and water reach the roots. Solid spikes only push soil sideways, and their holes close again after watering.

Which planting method, devised for steep Connecticut highway slopes, sprays a slurry from a tank onto bare ground?

Hydroseeding slurry often carries fertilizer, fibre mulch and green dye along with the seed. The mulch holds moisture around the seeds and speeds up germination.

Which nutrient, labelled K, does the last of the three numbers on a bag of lawn fertilizer stand for?

Potassium follows nitrogen and phosphorus on the label, and the figure is really its equivalent weight as potassium oxide. A 15-13-20 bag is still about half inert filler.

Which soil conditioner do gardeners spread on a lawn when a soil test shows the ground is too acidic?

Lime raises the pH of acidic soil and supplies calcium as well. Autumn is the preferred season to spread it, because winter snow, frost and thaw help work it into the ground.

Which metal, sold to gardeners in sulphate form, is used as a lawn conditioner and to kill moss in turf?

Iron sulphate is what greenkeepers use to clear silvery thread moss from golf putting greens. The same compound will stain concrete a yellowish rust colour.

The pale, C-shaped grubs that eat lawn roots across much of North America grow into which invasive pest?

Japanese beetle grubs feed so close to the surface that dying turf can be peeled back like a carpet to expose them. A biological control developed by the US government is sold as a powder for lawns.

Leatherjackets, the lawn grubs that struck Lord's Cricket Ground in London in 1935, are the larvae of which insect?

Crane fly adults are the gangly insects often called daddy longlegs. Their soil-dwelling young can be controlled with nematodes watered onto the ground, and starlings probe the turf to eat them.

Which fungal disease of closely mown turf shows up as small, round, straw-coloured, sunken patches of dead grass?

Dollar spot is so called because each patch is roughly the size of a silver dollar. Early in the day, while dew lingers, cobweb-like fungal threads can be seen on the grass.

Which 18th-century English gardener swept away formal parterres and ran open lawns right up to great country houses?

Capability Brown designed some 170 parks and gardens, and critics complained that every one left the main house in a sea of turf.

Which American lawn brand grew from a seed business founded in Marysville, Ohio, in 1868 and later joined Miracle-Gro?

Scotts first sold seed to farmers, turned to lawn grass for homeowners in the early 1900s, and began shipping seed to stores in 1924 after years of selling only by mail.

Which sprinkler brand grew from the impact sprinkler that California citrus grower Orton Englehart built in 1933?

Rain Bird was named after a Native American legend of a bird that brought rain, because the sprinkler looks bird-like in action. Its inventor preferred farming and sold the business in 1935.

Which weedkiller, released just after World War II, kills broadleaf weeds while leaving lawn grasses largely unharmed?

2,4-D kills by forcing broadleaf plants into uncontrolled growth, and it is now an active ingredient in more than 1,500 products.

Which agency's scientist used satellite data to estimate that US lawns cover more land than any single irrigated crop?

NASA researcher Cristina Milesi put American lawns at about 128,000 square kilometres, more than irrigated corn or wheat.

Which word for low-water landscaping did a Denver Water planner coin in 1981 from the Greek for dry?

Xeriscaping proved so easy to mishear as zero-scaping that in 2023 the utility that invented the word began rebranding the idea as ColoradoScaping.

Which fragrant herb, better known for flavouring teas, was a fashionable lawn plant in the England of Elizabeth I?

Chamomile lawns suit only light foot traffic, so stepping-stones are often set into them. Elizabethans also built raised chamomile seats, small scented lawns made for sitting on.

What is the lawn-care term for sowing fresh grass into thin turf or small bare patches to thicken an existing lawn?

Overseeding succeeds only when the seed touches soil and has space to germinate. Late winter, spring and early autumn are the times to do it.