Shade Tolerance Evaluation of South African Bermudagrass Germplasm.

Bermudagrass, Cynodon spp., is one of the most commonly grown turfgrass genera in the southern United States having excellent drought tolerance, but poor tolerance to shade. Developing cultivars tolerant to shade would allow bermudagrass to become more prevalent in home lawns or other recreational areas in NC, where trees dominant the landscape. In this study, nine accessions collected from Pretoria, South Africa were evaluated for their ability to grow under shade. These accessions and cultivars ‘Celebration’, ‘Tifgrand’ and ‘Tifway’ were evaluated under 0%, 63%, and 80% shade during 2011-2012. For both years, significant differences among shade levels, genotypes, and the interaction of the two were observed. As expected, the progression from 0% to 63% to 80% shade reduced normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), percent turfgrass cover, and turf quality readings for all accessions. Some genotypes, however, were able to maintain adequate quality and aggressiveness under low light conditions. Celebration, ‘WIN10F’ and ‘STIL03’ performed better than Tifway (P ≤ 0.05), the susceptible control. In addition, these genotypes were consistently better than all others, although these differences were not always significant at P=0.05. Overall, our results indicate that there are promising genotypes among the bermudagrass materials collected from South Africa. These accessions represent additional sources of shade tolerance to be used in bermudagrass breeding.