Festuca perennis Seeds | Perennial Ryegrass
LATIN NAME: Festuca perennis
COMMON NAME: Perennial Ryegrass
Plant Profile
Perennial ryegrass is a tufted, bright green grass of the family Poaceae, native to Europe, North Africa and temperate Asia and now the most widely sown grass in the temperate world. It grows thirty to ninety centimetres, with folded shoots, glossy leaves and a slender spike in which the spikelets sit edge-on along the stem.
It establishes faster than any other common lawn grass, and a sown sward knits within six weeks. It is shallow-rooted and does not creep, so it thins in drought and in deep shade, and it relies on tillering from the base rather than on runners. The older name, Lolium perenne, is still the one most people use.
Science & Biotechnology
The ryegrasses were moved into Festuca after molecular work showed them nested within the fescues, so Lolium perenne is now correctly Festuca perennis. The two genera also cross freely, and the hybrids, sold as festulolium, are bred to combine the fescue’s roots and persistence with the ryegrass’s speed of growth and digestibility.
The species carries a seed-borne fungus, Epichloë festucae var. lolii, that lives between the cells of the shoot and makes alkaloids which deter insects. One of those, lolitrem B, causes ryegrass staggers in sheep and cattle, and another, ergovaline, reduces feed intake in hot weather. New Zealand breeders replaced the wild endophyte with selected strains that keep the insect protection and produce little or none of the toxin, and those strains now underpin most of the country’s pasture seed.
Uses & Benefits
Perennial ryegrass is the backbone of lawns, playing fields and amenity turf, and it is the grass most often used to overseed a worn lawn because it shows through in a week. It is also the main sown pasture grass of New Zealand, Ireland and the British west, cut for silage two or three times a season.
As a garden plant it is useful for a quick green edge, for stabilising a bank after construction, and for mixing with slower fescues in a hard-wearing lawn. It is not a meadow grass: it needs feeding and frequent cutting to persist, and in an unmown meadow it is crowded out within two or three years. Its pollen is one of the main causes of summer hay fever in northern Europe.
Growing from Seed
Sow at twenty-five to thirty-five grams per square metre for a lawn, or fifteen kilograms per hectare in a pasture mix, from late summer to early autumn or in early spring. Scatter evenly, rake in, and firm the surface; seedlings show in five to seven days at 15-20 °C, the fastest of the common turf grasses.
Keep the surface damp until the seedlings are two centimetres tall, then water less often and more deeply to push the roots down. Mow for the first time at six centimetres and never take off more than a third of the leaf at once. In a lawn, feed in spring and again in early autumn; in a pasture, the grass is managed by grazing rather than by mowing.
Our Take
The quickest green in the seed catalogue, and the grass that makes a lawn a lawn. Sow thick, cut often, and expect to renew it after a hard summer.
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