A brown summer lawn looks dead, but most of the time it is asleep. Cool season grasses shut down their leaves in heat and drought to protect the crown, the living heart of each plant, and they wait for cooler,…
A lawn that looked healthy on Friday and skeletal by Monday has almost always met one thing in late summer: armyworm caterpillars feeding in numbers. They move across turf in a loose front, stripping the green from grass blades as…
If your lawn takes a summer of football, dog runs and paddling pools and still knits back together within a fortnight, the grass under your feet is almost certainly perennial ryegrass. It is the workhorse of hard wearing lawns, and…
The patch of lawn under the big tree at the side of the garden is the single most frustrating piece of turf in any garden. It thins. It moss-fills. It stays sparse no matter how much you seed, feed, or…
Two lawns sit side by side in the same dry July. One browns off in a week. The other stays green for a month without a drop of extra water. The difference is almost entirely underground, in how deep the…
Small dark spots on your grass blades in warm, muggy weather are the opening move of melting out, a fungal disease that can thin a thick lawn to a patchy mess in a fortnight. The spots themselves do limited harm.…
A steel blue tint spreading across your grass is the first thing to read on a hot week, and it shows up days before any brown appears. Catch it here and the lawn recovers in a day or two. Miss…
If patches of your lawn have started to feel spongy, lift like a loose carpet, or get torn up overnight by birds, foxes or badgers hunting for a meal, the cause is almost certainly grubs feeding on the roots below.…
When a hot, rainless fortnight turns most lawns the colour of straw, the patches that stay green are almost always tall fescue. It is the most drought-tolerant of the cool-season grasses, and the reason sits underground rather than in the…
A black or bronze ring where the fire pit stood, or a rectangle of yellow under the spot a barbecue sat all afternoon, is one of the fastest ways a summer garden loses its best grass. The heat does the…
