Dr Andy Newell of the Sports Turf Research Institute (STRI) in Bingley, England is the consulting agronomist for Wimbledon and he recently sent me these pictures. The STRI does a lot of the testing of grass species and cultivars and from these tests Wimbledon selects the grasses to plant on the courts. We do a great deal of similar testing here at state universities including UMass. These trials test for many attributes - for Wimbledon wear tolerance is obviously important. There can be huge differences in wear tolerance among grasses that seem similar. The bottom picture shows the machine that applies wear to the grass for testing.