Things Aren’t Always As They Seem

You want to see a plant perform several times before you give it a major role in your garden. We’ve all had our hearts broken a few times too many, and we’ve learned to be skeptical of wild-eyed claims.

Here are a few of my life’s wrong turns. Each of these particular bombs dealt fairly directly with turfgrass, and I’ve arranged them in rough chronological order.

• Zoysia plugs. This gem dates back to my teenage years in College Station. I read everything that even remotely dealt with gardening. It was my passion, and I wanted to try some of it all. That even included those sorry-dog zoysia plugs I bought by mail from Maryland. I had to mow 10 or 20 yards to get enough money to buy them. I was suckered in by the extravagant claims (which still run every spring). But, when my little treasures arrived, they were pretty much DOA.

I’m satisfied with my stance now on buying grass out of Sunday supplement magazine ads: you wouldn’t buy carpeting (sight unseen) through the mail, so why should you buy your lawn that way, either? Zoysias will probably be great lawngrasses for Texas someday, but, when you buy lawngrasses, buy from local sod dealers.

• Floratam St. Augustine (in North Texas). Back in the early 1970s, a viral disease called St. Augustine decline was killing St. Augustine turf all over the state. The University of Florida and Texas A&M partnered on releasing ‘Floratam’ St. Augustine, and many of us were quick to recommend it as a decline-resistant strain.

Bad move, at least for those of us in North Texas. ‘Floratam,’ it turned out, wasn’t winter-hardy in the northern two-thirds of our state, and it was all lost that first winter. Thousands of lawns. (Luckily, the much hardier ‘Raleigh’ strain followed just a couple of years later. That’s why I’m still reluctant to recommend new St. Augustine varieties until I’ve seen them survive a cold winter.)

• Buffalograss. This grass always caught my eye. It grows along roadsides, and nothing much seems to invade it. It looked like it should have been the perfect turfgrass for Texas. Sadly, however, once improved strains like ‘Prairie’ and ‘609’ came aboard, we found that if we watered buffalograss even modestly, bermuda would quickly overtake it — so, another dream was dashed.

“Expectations,” it seems, are dangerous things. “Hopes” are a safer place, coupled with research and experience. Try new plants cautiously, and keep an open mind to everything that you read (this column included).