Hybrid Landscape Offers a Way to Save Resources

Squinting as he gazed out over the barren, sun-dried landscape, James Baird was seeing a field of possibilities.

Baird, a professor of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, is the leading mind behind the annual Turfgrass and Landscape Field Day at UCR.

The event, sponsored by UCR's Agriculture and Natural Resources and Cooperative Extension programs, is aimed at bringing together academic research and industry economics toward a broader goal of more efficient, water-saving landscaping technologies.

"Water is only going to get more scarce," said Baird, a new faculty member who brought back the event on Thursday after a multiyear hiatus.

"And landscaping is one of those areas where we can make major progress first, where we can really work to be good stewards of the environment."

The story in the Inland Empire is a similar one playing out throughout the American West, where explosive economic and population growth in recent decades have tested the limits of the arid region's capacity to provide enough water for everyone.

Complex but aging systems of reservoirs, aqueducts and dams engineered to accommodate last century's western expansion are near their limits, and the prospect that climate change will result in less water in the future is an added concern.

So, Baird said, part of the answer to living comfortably but responsibly in a region, that on average receives less than 20 inches of rain per year, is more environmentally friendly and less thirsty landscaping solutions.

"When I came on, I immediately realized the need for the landscaping industry" to embrace water-saving techniques, Baird said.

The event drew about 250 representatives from landscaping-related fields, such as municipal parks managers, golf course engineers, fertilizing and seed company officials and others.

About 10 university professors and 40 staff and students helped to put on the event, which had about a dozen stations where attendees got to examine and listen to brief outdoor lectures about different types of grasses and landscaping turf, said Frank Wong of the university's Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology.

"What you see here represents more than 30 years of research and experiments," Wong said.

Some of the biggest breakthroughs in developing prettier, tougher and less thirsty landscape turfs have been through the developing of hybrid grasses, which are created by cross breeding to blend the best attributes of different species into the same grass.

Key attributes include making grasses easy to grow, durable, drough-resistant and requiring minimal fertilizer, Wong said.

One hybrid grass Baird lectured on was a cross between tall fescue and perennial rye grass, which produced a grass both drought- resistant and fast growing.

But the crossbreeding is not simple, Wong said, and imperfections or unforeseen complications make the process difficult.

"It's like breeding to produce a mule, which are good at what they do but are sterile," Wong said. "There are limitations."

But the more pressing limitation is clearly water - and the ability to stretch this finite resource to meet the needs of millions of Southern Californians.

Golf courses are a huge part of the equation, professors and industry professionals agreed. A 110-acre course, using a thirstier breed of grass, can swallow up as much as 1 million gallons per day, said Jim Culley, regional sales manager for Los Angeles-based Stone Seed Co.

Now, a combination of local regulations and soaring prices have pushed course owners and operators to scale back watering, improve irrigation and change turf types, Culley said.

"You can use 20 percent less water easy with new turf," Culley said.

Daniel Ward, a senior park maintenance supervisor for the city of Los Angeles, said he was on hand to learn the latest techniques and stay up to date. He has to, he added.

"The city of Los Angeles has drastically restricted water use," Ward said. "And that is the way of the future