Which grass belongs in your yard.

EMPIRE is a japonica, medium-coarse at 5 to 7 mm. Standing next to Zeon the difference is obvious; from the street, much less so, and it costs less and asks less of you.

It takes a rotary mower at 1 to 2 inches without complaint, which is the single biggest reason we point homeowners here. It also greens up reasonably early for a zoysia.

Give it five or six hours of sun. In heavier shade it thins, and thin zoysia is slow to recover because it spreads by stolons rather than seed.

Centipede has been called the lazy man's grass for eighty years and the nickname is earned. It wants roughly a quarter of the nitrogen bermuda does, and it grows slowly enough that mowing every ten days is fine.

It prefers acidic soil, which most of the sandy clay around Augusta already is. Do not lime it unless a soil test tells you to. Pushing the pH up is one of the reliable ways to cause decline.

It is naturally a lighter green than zoysia or bermuda. That is the cultivar, not a deficiency, and reaching for iron or nitrogen to darken it is how people get into trouble.

Where it genuinely does not work: dog runs, kids' goal mouths, driveway edges people cut across. It has no meaningful recovery from wear.

TifTuf was selected specifically for drought performance and it holds colour through dry spells that make other bermudas go off. In a CSRA August that is worth real money in water.

Wear recovery is its other advantage: it spreads aggressively by both stolons and rhizomes, so a worn patch fills in on its own within weeks during the growing season.

The price of all that is sun and mowing. Eight hours of direct sun is the floor, and it grows fast enough in June that a weekly cut is a minimum, not a target.

419 has been the standard athletic bermuda for decades and the reason is durability under concentrated traffic. If the use case is a field, this is still the default.

It wants to be cut low, half an inch to an inch and a half, which in practice means often. Let it get away from you and scalping it back looks rough for a fortnight.

For a homeowner who wants bermuda, TifTuf is usually the better recommendation. We will say so rather than sell you the more expensive install.

St. Augustine is the answer when the honest assessment is that a lot has too much canopy for zoysia. Palmetto handles the deepest shade of anything on this list and does it at a reasonable price.

Recognising it is easy: a wide blade with a blunt, boat-shaped tip rather than a taper. Cut it high, 3 inches or more, because leaf area is how it survives low light.

Two real weaknesses. Chinch bugs find it, so a thinning patch in full sun in July deserves a look before you reach for fertiliser. And it is the least cold-hardy grass here; we are near the northern edge of where it is comfortable.

It also does not take traffic. Shade plus a path worn through it is a combination that ends badly.