His Whole World Is Grass
Lawn guru Reed Funk speaks to the tough little cultivar inside us all
Prof. Reed Funk is in search of the perfect blade of grass. It must defy drought, flood and neglect, and vanquish diseases, pests and weeds. It should be slender, thrusting upward like a soldier in an invincible army, and of stubborn stock and good lineage, returning year after year, undiminished in vigor.
Funk is a soft-spoken, self-effacing botanist who was born on a Utah dairy farm, teaches at Rutgers University and is known fondly among his peers as "The Great Reed." He is also the guru of what may well be the nation's largest cult: the 54 million Americans who worship that monochromatic expanse of green known as the lawn, groaning behind their mowers in summer and getting down on their knees to patch and reseed in fall.
The role of lawn guru is no trifling assignment. Home lawns cover about 23 million acres across the country. If you include roadsides and greenswards kept trimmed by businesses and educational institutions, U.S. turf grass spreads over nearly 50 million acres, a land area equal to about half the nation's reserve of wetlands. And lawns are big business: In 1994--the most recent year for which statistics are available--the lawn industry raked in $8.4 billion, with items ranging from a $3,000 lawn tractor to a $10 hand tool called the dethatcher, from rolls of sod at $1 per square foot to 10-pound bags of herbicides at $15 each. For homeowners and golf course managers, the yearly tribute to grass seeds alone is $800 million, and nearly every year all sectors of the lawn industry set new sales records.
Turf king. Funk, however, is more than up to the task. His whole world is grass. Except for the days before he received his Ph.D., when he dabbled in animal husbandry and corn improvement, he has dedicated most of his 67 years to one goal: upgrading the best grass plants on the market. The botanist takes no holidays; he has no hobbies. He says, "When one has such a wonderful specialty as grass, why do anything else?" And single-mindedness has brought him fame--at least in certain, grass-appreciative circles. Kevin Morris, head of the National Turfgrass Evaluation Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, says, "As a hybridizer, Funk is responsible for developing up to 80 percent of the grasses making up our lawns today." Jim Brooks, director of the Lawn Institute, the industry's research arm, is also full of praise. "Dr. Funk is the father of turf research," Brooks says. "No one can touch him."
When Funk travels, he haunts Civil War cemeteries, golf courses and public parks, searching for clumps of grass that have managed to thrive despite thousands of stomping feet, competition from rampant weeds and lack of irrigation. He recalls with particular affection an unusually vigorous clump he dug up 34 years ago in New York's Central Park that eventually sired the cultivar Manhattan--still one of the world's most widely used perennial ryegrasses. (A descendant, Manhattan II, ranks among this year's top recommendations by the Lawn Institute's review board.)
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