Which grass belongs in your yard

EMPIRE is a japonica, medium-coarse at 5 to 7 mm. Standing next to Zeon the difference is obvious; from the street, much less so, and it costs less and asks less of you.

It takes a rotary mower at 1 to 2 inches without complaint, which is the single biggest reason we point homeowners here. It also greens up reasonably early for a zoysia.

Give it four hours of sun. In heavier shade it thins, and thin zoysia is slow to recover because it spreads by stolons rather than seed.

Centipede has been called the lazy man's grass for eighty years and the nickname is earned. It wants roughly a quarter of the nitrogen bermuda does, and it grows slowly enough that mowing every ten days is fine.

It prefers acidic soil, which most of the sandy clay around Augusta already is. Don't lime it unless a soil test tells you to. Pushing the pH up is one of the reliable ways to cause decline.

It's naturally a lighter green than zoysia or bermuda. That's the cultivar, not a deficiency, and reaching for iron or nitrogen to darken it is how people get into trouble.

Where it struggles: dog runs, kids' goal mouths, driveway edges people cut across. It does fill back in, but slowly — it spreads by stolons and grows at its own pace, so anywhere that gets walked on daily never gets the chance to close up.

TifTuf was selected specifically for drought performance and it holds color through dry spells that make other bermudas go off. In a CSRA August that's worth real money in water.

Wear recovery is its other advantage: it spreads aggressively by both stolons and rhizomes, so a worn patch fills in on its own within weeks during the growing season.

The price of all that is sun and mowing. Eight hours of direct sun is the floor, and it grows fast enough in June that a weekly cut is a minimum, not a target.

419 has been the standard athletic bermuda for decades and the reason is durability under concentrated traffic. If the use case is a field, this is still the default.

It wants to be cut low, half an inch to an inch and a half, which in practice means often. Let it get away from you and scalping it back looks rough for a couple of weeks.

For a homeowner who wants bermuda, Celebration is usually the better recommendation — it takes some shade and asks less of you through the season.

Celebration came out of Australia, bred by Rod Riley, and it's a straight Cynodon dactylon rather than one of the Tif hybrids. The blade is broader and the growth habit more open, which is why it takes an ordinary rotary mower where 419 wants to be cut low and often.

Shade is the reason to ask for it. It ranked first in a Clemson study of shade performance, and it's the only bermuda we'd put anywhere near a tree line. It's also rated at the top for drought in comparative bermuda trials.

Wear recovery is the other half. Deep roots and tough runners mean it repairs divots quickly, which is why it turns up on sports fields as often as it does on front lawns.

St. Augustine is the answer when the honest assessment is that a lot has too much canopy for zoysia. Palmetto handles the deepest shade of anything on this list and does it at a reasonable price.

Recognizing it is easy: a wide blade with a blunt, boat-shaped tip rather than a taper. Cut it high, 3 inches or more, because leaf area is how it survives low light.

Two real weaknesses. Chinch bugs find it, so a thinning patch in full sun in July deserves a look before you reach for fertilizer. And it's the least cold-hardy grass here; we're near the northern edge of where it's comfortable.

It also doesn't take traffic. Shade plus a path worn through it is a combination that ends badly.

ProVista is the first glyphosate-tolerant St. Augustine. In practice that means broadleaf and grassy weeds can be sprayed out of the lawn without killing the lawn, which is normally the hard part of keeping St. Augustine clean.

It also grows slowly upward. Scotts put it at about half the mowing of a standard St. Augustine, and the canopy is dense enough that it crowds weeds out on its own.

It wants four hours of sun or better, and it holds a dark color on fewer inputs than Palmetto does. It's the premium end of the St. Augustines and it's priced there.

Cobalt is the newest of the St. Augustines on this list, out of nearly twenty years of breeding by Texas A&M AgriLife with Sod Solutions. The broad blades knit into a thicker, more uniform turf than older varieties manage.

Color is the obvious difference. It's noticeably darker than Palmetto stood side by side, and it keeps that color through dry spells because its drought tolerance and water efficiency are where the breeding effort went.

It handles partial shade well, tolerates filtered light under trees, and carries improved resistance to the pests and diseases that usually find St. Augustine.

Palisades is a japonica zoysia from Texas A&M, medium-coarse in the blade and close to EMPIRE to look at. What separates it is what it does with less.

It holds on at three to four hours of direct sun, which is where most japonicas give up. That makes it the answer on a lot with significant canopy or a north-facing aspect.

Drought tolerance is the other half. Trials have had it surviving long stretches without water once it is established.