As the needs of landscapers have enhanced and diversified, so too have the tools they use to produce the best and most effective gardens and landscapes for their clients.
One particularly useful tool in this regard is artificial grass, which is often installed to enable year-round low-maintenance gardens, parks and landscapes through the use of a beautiful, hardwearing alternative to lawn grass.
It has come a long way since its invention in the 1960s, but what was artificial grass initially invented for, and why did it become so necessary?
A clue to this can be found with the brand name most commonly associated with artificial grass: AstroTurf.
Why Was Artificial Grass Invented?
Artificial grass was first invented in 1964 under the name “ChemGrass”, but a year later, it would change its name based on how it saved the fortunes and spared the blushes of a particularly unfortunate stadium in Houston, Texas.
The Astrodome was the world’s first indoor domed stadium with air conditioning, which allowed for the typically extremely hot city to host sports such as American football and baseball.
The first major tenant was the latter, Major League Baseball’s Houston Astros from 1965, but this revealed a fundamental flaw with the stadium.
The glazed roof panels had been painted to stop players from getting glare in their eyes when hunting for the ball, but this meant that grass would not grow. This problem was so bad that at one point during the 1965 season, the outfield dirt was painted green.
Even before the grass outright died, the particular indoor grass used would create condensation through the way it released moisture, causing baseball games to be delayed to avoid slip hazards.
Hitting an embarrassing impasse, the decision was made to install ChemGrass in the Astrodome, making it the first ever major sports stadium to use an artificial grass surface.
Due to the low supply, due to the Astrodome being the first major order of ChemGrass, it was only used in the infield until halfway through the season, when the remaining section of the field was also covered with artificial turf.
How Did The Astrodome Shape Artificial Grass?
The newly-renamed AstroTurf was a massive success, causing huge audiences to attend baseball games just to see it in action. This not only shaped the surface of major sporting venues for the next few decades but also revealed an important additional benefit of artificial grass.
Not only was it useful practically, allowing grass to grow where it otherwise could not, it was also low-maintenance, required very little water to maintain compared to a typical playing field and could endure throughout the year rather than being painstakingly renewed during the winter.
All of these benefits, which became ubiquitous in sports for decades, would eventually translate into other landscaping projects, as artificial grass would look incredible with the right infill and when placed alongside beautiful plants and trees.
A lot of lessons were learned through its rigorous use in the Astrodome as well; modern artificial grass surfaces are far softer, thicker, and feel much more like natural grass, aided by the use of infill materials to keep the blades raised.