Bermuda Grass

What’s still blooming: Nothing.

What’s turned/turning red: Bradford pear, choke cherry, pasture rose, spirea, raspberry.

What’s turned/turning yellow: Sour cherries, apples, peach, rugosa rose, Apache plume, iris, Rumanian sage, yellow alyssum.

What’s happening inside: African aptenia and asparagus fern blooming; red tinges rochea and Christmas cactus leaves.

Animal sightings: Mice and birds testing the house’s defenses.

Weather: End of the week morning temperatures below freezing; last rain 10/28/09; 9:35 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: When I was a child in Michigan, our winter yard was either green or white. When snow was pushed into great piles in parking lots, it turned black. Green, white and soot were the colors of winter.

When I moved to west Texas in 1982, it was late summer and the lawn was green. When temperatures fell in fall, everything turned brown, and stayed brown. Bermuda grass was grown around Abilene because it was as close as people could come to the lawns of the north in summer. However, it begins to discolor when average temperatures fall below 50 degrees and the above ground growth dies when they fall below 30. The color of winter there was papery brown.

Here bunch grasses dominate the prairie. The tops turned brown long ago, but there’s a ring of green at the bases of the clumps. The color of winter is a velvety brown.

Recently, people who live along ditches that once served hay fields have been using flood irrigation for lawns. Most have planted some grass species that’s still green, but some yards have turned tan and will remain so until late spring.

I live up hill from the old ditch that watered livestock. Most of my land is either bunch grass or scrub. However, on the east side of the house there’s some Bermuda grass that may have come in the siding when the house was moved from Texas.

It doesn’t do particularly well here. Bermuda grass likes at least 25" of water a year. In Texas, the surviving deep roots and shallow rhizomes first sent up new shoots in spring, then sent out horizontal stems to colonize new areas. Since the grass was already thickly spaced and mowed often, the vertical growth dominates and the stolons had little opportunity to survive.

Here, the plant allocates more energy to sending out stolons to find moisture than in sending up dense, long blades. There’s only one clump, between a hose and the retaining wall, that’s ever put out radiating seed spikes.

Usually when the exploring growth, with its curling tufts, ever gets near water, it also gets near other plants, which prevent it from thriving in their shade. The horizontal stems are most visible trying to cross the block walk to escape the fence and sunflowers or going over the retaining walls to get beyond the planted buffalo and blue grama grasses.

A nomad’s ability to adapt has been built into the plant’s DNA. The Cynodon genus apparently evolved in east or southeastern Africa where two species are found in the eastern tropics, one in the rift valley, one from Madagascar east, one from Transvaal to the Cape, and two elsewhere in South Africa.

The common Bermuda grass species, dactylon, is a genetic mutation with twice the number of chromosomes that spread out of Africa where it evolved into subspecies. The variety that spread through the Seleucid Empire from modern Pakistan to Turkey, and into Europe is dactylon dactylon and probably resulted from a cross between African and an Afghan subspecies.

No one knows how it got to the New World, only that it was in the colonial south before the Revolution. It may have moved first to the Carribean on some Portuguese or Dutch ship that also plied the east, then migrated from there to the south on any number of vessels that sailed between Caribbean and southern ports.

In warmer climates it stays green all year, and is used to feed cattle everywhere. Ethnologists have reported parts have been used for traditional medical cures in India, Turkey, and northwestern Iran. In this country it’s most commonly used for golf courses.

In the colder latitudes, it can still form sods. It may brown in winter, but it keeps the summers green by preventing barren soils stripped of their native bunch grasses from blowing away.

Notes:
Assefa, S., C. M. Taliaferro, M. P. Anderson, D. G. de los Reyes, R. M. Edwards. "Diversity among Cyondon Accessions and Taxa Based on DNA Amplification Finerprinting," Genome 42:465-474:1999; origin chart based on J. M. J. de Wet and J. R. Harlan, "Biosystemics of Cyondon L. C. Rich (Gramminae)," Taxon 19:565-569:1970 and J. R. Harlan., J. M. J. de Wet, K. M. Rawal, M. R. Felder, and W. L. Richardson,"Cytogenetic Studies in Cynodon L. C. Rich. (Gramineae)," Crop Science 10:288-291:1970.

Harlan, J. R., J. M. J. de Wet and K. M. Rawal "Origin and Distribution of the Seleucidus Race of Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers. var.dactylon (Gramineae)," Euphytica 19:465-469:1970.

Newman, Dara. "Cynodon dactylon," Nature Conservatory Stewardship abstract, 1 March 1992.

Photograph: Bermuda grass stolons growing over the timber retaining wall, 1 November 2009.