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AU Victory:
A Bent Grass Success Story By Ian Thompson, originally published in Thompson Tees Off
Al ab ama Tu rf Tim e s > >> Spr ing 2019
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have two children who attend Auburn University, but their choice of college has no bearing on this story. It is a nice side-note though, that when I told them about AU Victory, they both at first thought I was talking about the football team’s latest W! No, this is a victory for golf courses in the heat of the south desiring to use bent grass on their putting surfaces. It has been a true success story on the greens at the aptly-named Bent Brook, a course of 30 years, which stands adjacent to I-459 near Bessemer, along with recent converts Shoal Creek, Vestavia CC and others across the state and further afield. If the words “a truly heat-tolerant bent grass” seem a contraction, AU Victory is here to prove doubters wrong. Before I impart the in-depth thoughts of long-time Bent Brook superintendent Johnny Perry, along with Lee McLemore, AU graduate and course superintendent since 1987 over both courses and the always immaculate grounds at The Country Club of Birmingham, allow me to visit a story written about the advent of this resilient strain of bent grass, published three years ago by Auburn University’s agriculture department, but still highly relevant today...
The story of AU Victory as told by Auburn University’s agriculture department The new variety — the first bent grass released by the university’s turfgrass
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research team — could be the perfect solution for golf course superintendents looking for a bent grass putting surface that will thrive in the high humidity and heat that characterizes many areas where such putting greens are featured. Edzard van Santen, a professor in the Department of Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences who specializes in plant breeding and genetics, said AU Victory is a survivor of collections made from putting greens during prolonged summer droughts. He describes his approach to developing AU Victory as part “tough love” and part “survival of the fittest.” “In Alabama, bent grass is grown mostly in the northern third of the state, but some golf courses don’t have their own water sources, relying instead on municipal water systems,” van Santen said. “When weather conditions turned dry during the summers of 1999 and 2000, some cities cut off the golf courses’ water supplies to help conserve water. As a result, some of the greens couldn’t be watered.” Seeing an opportunity, van Santen salvaged surviving plugs from otherwise decimated greens. Approximately 300 individual plugs were collected, grown in a greenhouse and transplanted to a field at Auburn University’s Tennessee Valley Research and Extension Center in Belle Mina. That’s when a two-year period of tough love began. “I asked the folks in north Alabama to mow them occasionally but to
otherwise forget about them. If they don’t survive, then that’ll be the end of the project.” But some — about half of them — did survive, so van Santen initiated a collaborative effort with Virginia Lehman, a private turfgrass breeder in Oregon. She eliminated 50 of the entries based on appearance and turf quality. “Seed production for cool-season grasses such as bent grass must occur in Oregon or a similar climate,” van Santen said. “We can’t produce the seed here because the weather’s too hot, and the seed matures too late. Oregon has nice, mild winters, and the grass lives on residual soil moisture during the summer due to a lack of rainfall, resulting in excellent seed quality.” Seed harvested from the 100 remaining entries was used to establish plots at Auburn, plots that were rated for color, turf quality and disease tolerance. “In late May of 2004, we began withholding all fungicide applications from the evaluation trial, and we minimized supplemental irrigation. Very little disease was noted throughout the summer, but in October of 2004, a severe dollar-spot infestation occurred, allowing us to distinguish our entries from commercial comparisons.” Plugs from selected entries then were sent to Oregon to establish breeder-seed nurseries, which were harvested for seed in 2005 and 2006. Beginning in fall 2005, these two experimental populations were tested in various trials at Auburn and used
