Please educate me...
What do you mean by warm season grasses? Could you provide examples of the specific grasses?
From my understanding the warm season grasses are Zoysia and Bermuda; any others?
Cool would be Bent, Rye, and Fescue. (Is fescue considered cool season?)
David and Mac,
This'll be more info than you want, and hopefully I'll get a chime in from some dudes like Mahaffey, Beck, Nysse, and Larson to clarify my answer.
Grasses all belong to the family Gramineae, of which there are six subfamilies. Only three subfamilies of grass are used for golf. Pooid, chloroid, and panicoid.
Pooid (cool season or festucoid) grasses typically grow best in subarctic, tenmperate, and sometimes even subtropical cliates. They are a bimodal plant that has two primary growth periods, spring and fall. They are best kept at a temperature between 60 and 75 degrees, hence the trouble with cool season grasses during hot summers. They include the bentgrasses, ryegrasses, fescue grasses, and bluegrasses.
Chloroid grasses are a warm season grass. They are found mostly in subtropical and tropical climates and sometimes (rarely) in temperate climates. They are best kept at a temp range of 80 to 95 degrees. Due to this temp range, they are a unimodal growth pattern plant, with most shoots and roots grown during the late spring to early fall. They are also a "dormancy seeking" plant in winter--unlike their cool season counterparts. For the purposes of golf, the chloroids are bermuda and all hybrid bermudas, zoysia and any off shoots of zoysia.
Panicoid grasses are a warm season grass found exclusively in subtropical and tropical climates. They also survive best between 80 and 95 degrees and display a unimodal growth pattern. They differ from chloroids mostly in blade width and water requirements (more). Turfs used for golf in this family include St. Augustine, Kikuyu and Papsalum.