What's Fescue? How to Pick the Right One for Your Yard

A genus. Fescue is the common name for Festuca, a Latin word meaning stem or stalk, and asking for fescue at a garden center is closer to asking for a citrus than asking for a lemon.

The scale is larger than most people expect.

There are more than 450 fescue species, of which only about 10 have characteristics that suit them to turf at all.

The rest are pasture, prairie, woodland and ornamental plants.

Those ten split into two groups that behave nothing alike, and the split is simply leaf width.

Coarse fescues have wide blades.

Fine fescues have narrow, almost bristle-like ones. They differ in shade tolerance, fertilizer need, wear tolerance and seeding rate, so a single set of care numbers for fescue is worth very little.

The rest of this page sorts out which one you are holding, which ones are not lawn grass at all, and which of the two groups belongs in your yard.

Two species, and only one of them is a lawn grass.

The naming is genuinely messy, and it is worth seeing rather than glossing over.

Tall fescue appears in the literature as Festuca arundinacea, as Schedonorus arundinaceus, and as Lolium arundinaceum.

All three name one plant.

Meadow fescue is Schedonorus pratensis, formerly Festuca pratensis, and it also goes by English bluegrass.

The two look similar in the field, both being coarse-leaved.

What separates them for a homeowner is that tall fescue is bred and sold for turf while meadow fescue is not, so a bag of the second is a bag of pasture seed.

Where the yard is warm enough that neither of them holds through summer, a warm-season grass such as zoysia takes over the job entirely.

It is a forage-type cultivar, and forage is a different job from lawn. Kentucky-31, usually written K-31, is the tall fescue in the cheapest large bag on the shelf, and Colorado State discourages its use outright on the grounds that it provides poor quality turf.

What you are looking at is one species behaving two ways.

Forage-type cultivars were selected to produce bulk for grazing animals, so they grow wide-bladed and clumpy with visible soil between the plants.

Turf-type tall fescue has a finer leaf texture than the old forage cultivars, and it is the one that makes a lawn.

The right purchase is a turf-type blend. Seed distributors combine two to five tall fescue varieties into one bag, which spreads disease risk across varieties, and those blends are generally cheaper than buying a single named variety.

No.

Some tall fescue cultivars do produce short rhizomes and get marketed as RTF, but these rhizome-forming cultivars are not a different species. They are tall fescue.

The distinction matters because of what people expect from the word. Tall fescue is otherwise a bunch grass with poor self-repair, so a short rhizome gives you limited local spread rather than the genuine self-knitting a rhizome grass like kentucky bluegrass does across a whole lawn.

Five taxa, three of which are subspecies of the same plant. They are strong creeping red, slender creeping red, Chewings, sheep and hard fescue, and they share a very narrow bristle-like leaf that makes them soft underfoot and hard to tell apart.

One difference decides how the lawn behaves. Only the two creeping reds spread, using rhizomes to close small bare patches, while Chewings, hard and sheep fescue are bunch types that stay exactly where they were seeded.

As a group they have potentially the best shade tolerance of any commonly used turfgrass, prefer low nitrogen, tolerate rocky, sandy and clay soil, and are very cold tolerant, which makes them an excellent high-elevation grass. The fine fescue page takes each of the five apart properly, including which ones you can actually buy.

Several, and the name gives you no warning. Of the 450-odd species in the genus, the ones you are most likely to meet under the fescue label are ornamental, wild or weedy rather than turf.

Blue fescue, Festuca glauca, is the one people actually buy by mistake. It is a common ornamental grass for landscape beds, grown as a tight silver-blue mound, and it is sold in pots beside plants rather than in bags beside lawn seed.

Molate fescue sits in between, a rhizomatous red fescue used in grassland restoration and no-mow landscapes rather than in mown turf. Where a fescue looks unusual, the scientific name on the tag settles it faster than the common one ever will.

For almost every yard the real question narrows to these two, and the answer is decided by sun and traffic rather than by preference.

Tall fescue is the choice for open sun, summer heat, foot traffic and dry spells. It establishes quickly, roots deeply enough to be genuinely drought resistant, tolerates wear, has few disease and insect problems, forms thatch slowly and still does well in moderate shade.

Its costs are real but narrow. Seeding can produce poor results unless done carefully, sod is less available than for bluegrass, heavy use by children or pets wears it enough to need overseeding, and if rooting is restricted by poor soil it may want as much irrigation as Kentucky bluegrass, or more.

Fine fescue is the choice for shade, poor soil and low input.

Very good shade tolerance, high leaf density, a preference for low nitrogen, and real tolerance of rocky, sandy and clay ground. It gives up wear tolerance to get there, recovers slowly from traffic injury, and may go dormant through one to two weeks of heat in the nineties.

If the real comparison in your head is fescue against the other cool-season default, fescue against kentucky bluegrass puts the water and fertilizer numbers side by side.

A yard with both conditions takes both grasses. Fine fescues are routinely mixed with tall fescue to improve performance in the shaded parts of a lawn, which is a better answer than asking one grass to do two jobs it was not selected for, and fescue against bermuda settles the question in yards hot enough for both to be candidates.

Seed size and establishment vigor differ between the two groups. Tall fescue goes down at 6 to 8 pounds per 1,000 square feet, and the fine fescues at 3.5 to 6, varying a little across the five taxa.

Going below the range does not save money in the end.

A rate too low leaves an open stand that weeds and erosion both move into before the grass closes, and the repair costs more than the seed did.

Overseeding is the fix, and it is cheaper to seed at the right rate than to repair a thin stand later.

Better than anything else in the cool-season aisle. Colorado State ranks turfgrass persistence under low maintenance from 1 for the best to 10 for the worst, where persistence means surviving reduced water, fertilizer and pest control rather than looking good under full care.

Every fescue on that list outranks every bluegrass and every ryegrass on it, which is the single most useful thing this page can tell somebody choosing a cool-season lawn. Only buffalo grass, a warm-season native, beats the hard and sheep fescues outright.

Read it as a budget rather than a scoreboard. If the lawn will be watered and fed on schedule the ranking hardly matters, and if it will not, the gap between a hard fescue at 2 and perennial ryegrass at 9 is the difference between a lawn and a reseeding project.

Whatever the back says, and nothing the front implies. Fescue blend on a label is a genus, a marketing word and no commitment at all.

A tall fescue blend is usually the honest version of the phrase, combining two to five tall fescue varieties in one bag, which spreads disease risk and costs less than a single named variety.

A fine fescue product is more of a lottery. Purdue found that 66 percent of northern lawn seed products contain at least one fine fescue, most often strong creeping red at 64 percent of products or Chewings at 27, while sheep fescue appeared in none of the 232 products surveyed.

Labels compound it. Some bags say only red fescue or creeping red fescue without telling you which of the two subspecies is inside, and those two differ in exactly the property that decides whether the lawn closes its own bare patches.