Heat-Tolerant Grasses

Warm-Climate Grasses

• Grasses include important food grains. Four of the five crops that supply nearly two-thirds of the human diet are grasses, the exception being potatoes. All grasses have jointed round or flattened usually hollow stems, small leaves and small, simple flowers grouped in "spikelets." Grasses use C3 or C4 photosynthetic pathways to utilize carbon. Grasses adapted to warm temperatures at low elevations and latitudes have a specialized metabolism that enables them to better fix carbon. These types of grasses, called C4 grasses, are found in the tropics, semiarid grasslands and warm deserts of the world.

Lawn Grasses

• Heat-tolerant lawns are composed of single varieties of adapted grass or are grown from specialized seed collections. Tall fescue grasses are tolerant of both heat and drought. Select turf-type varieties for lawns. Keep tall fescues mowed at 2 inches high or more. Buffalo grass (Buchloe dactyloides) is tolerant of heat and drought, and can be mowed or left long and soft. "Legacy" is an improved variety for a tough turf-type lawn. "UC Verde" was developed as a fine lawn grass staying below 8 inches high. Consult your nursery or a reputable online source for selecting heat-tolerant seed mixtures suitable to your locale.

Landscape Grasses

• Heat-loving ornamental grasses provide textural interest to the landscape. Cortaderia selloana "Pumila" is a dwarf pampas grass growing 6 feet tall and 3 feet wide, producing fluffy white plumes on sturdy stems above grassy clumps. Jose Select tall wheatgrass (Elytrigia elongata "Jose Select") produces decorative flower stalks nearly 5 feet high of straw-yellow. It provides an attractive vertical contrast to clumping or mounding ornamental grasses such as Nassella tenuissima, commonly called silky thread grass, or Panicum virgatum "Dallas Blue."

Native Grasses

• Both annual and perennial grasses are native to hot climate regions. In the deserts, winter-spring annuals or summer annuals spring up after seasonal rains. Bigelow bluegrass, little barley and sixweeks fescue are spring annuals. Various grama grasses, panic grasses and sixweeks threeawn are among the annual summer grasses. Fluffgrass is a tufted perennial desert grass that often behaves as an annual. Rothrock grama and Mayo grama are perennials native to the Sonoran desert. Several grasses native to Florida are aquatic, including valuable species such as maidencane and knot-grass. Sugarcane plume grass and giant foxtail are very large native varieties.