He was involved in negotiations with Augustus and Charles Storrs to establish a school of agriculture on 170 acres of their land in Storrs, Connecticut. As a result, in 1881 the Storrs School of Agriculture was established, and Olcott become a member of their first Board of Trustees. In 1893 the school become Connecticut’s land-grant college, in 1899 the name was changed to Connecticut Agricultural College, and so it seems that an agrostologist was responsible for what today is known as the University of Connecticut.


Around 1912, Olcott’s turf garden was sold to the famous industrialist Frederick W. Taylor, who moved most of his grasses via sod, and in particular the fine fescues, to his estate near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for use as a golf course.


In 1894, Zoysia japonica was the second zoysiagrass species to arrive in the U.S., thanks to John M.B. Sill (1831-1901). He served as a U.S. diplomat to Korea from 1894-1897. In 1894, he sent seed of Zoysia japonica to the USDA. It is interesting to note, that by 1906, use of zoysiagrass for lawns from the Carolinas to Washington, DC, was being described in the popular press. After his service in Korea, Sill served on the Board of Regents at the University of Michigan.


How do we know about Olcott and Sill’s zoysiagrasses? A detailed description of those grasses from 1892 and 1894 was published by Frank Lamson-Scribner (1851-1938) in 1895. He was born in Massachusetts, but his parents died when he was three years old and then he was adopted by the Scribner family of Maine. He graduated from the Maine State Collee of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in 1873. He taught high school botany in Maine, and then worked at Girard College in Philadelphia, which coincidently was close-by to F.W. Taylor’s estate.


In the summer of 1883, Lamson-Scriber worked in Montana as the botanist for the Northern Transcontinental Survey completing an inventory of grasses and forages. In 1885, he was appointed to the USDA Division of Botany, to study fungal pathogens affecting crops. As a result, he became chief of the USDA Section of Mycology in 1886 and focused on vegetable crop diseases. Ten, in 1888, he become head of the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee.


In 1894, Lamson-Scribner returned to the USDA to become head of the new USDA Division of Agrostology. He first described zoysiagrass use in the U.S. in 1895, as a grass species which “form close, leafy mats over the surface of the ground, and usually possess considerable value for grazing or for lawns…” He used Zoysia pungens as the botanical name (‘pungens’ referring to sharp or pointed leaves), however, these zoysiagrasses were later named Zoysia matrella and Zoysia japonica, which are the correct botanical names we use today.


TPI Turf News May/June 2021


“Official record keeping of plant introductions into the U.S. was


established in 1898 by the USDA’s Office of Seed Plant Introduction.”


He was known as a botanist and pioneering plant pathologist and became the first USDA scientist hired to study plant diseases of economic plants. He was also the first USDA agrostologist. He was author of the American Grasses, a USDA treatise published in 1897, with 331 pages that included a botanical description and detailed illustrations of grass species in the U.S.


Official record keeping of plant introductions into the U.S. was established in 1898 by the USDA’s Office of Seed Plant Introduction. Tus, the first official introduction of zoysiagrass into the U.S. was by Reverend W.M. Baird in 1901, who was a Korean missionary but also responsible for collecting economically important plants for the USDA. In the early 1900s, the soybean variety ‘Baird’ was named after him.


In 1901, however, Baird collected two varieties of what he described as Zoysia pungens used for lawns in an area that is now North Korea. It was later reclassified as Zoysia japonica. Te two varieties he collected, which he called “Korean lawn grass,” were given the documented introduction codes of PI 6404 and PI 6405. Unfortunately, very little information is available about Reverend Baird.


We’ll continue with Part Two of our historical review of these zoysiagrass pioneer plant explorers in the July/ August issue of Turf News.


Source: Patton, A.J., B.M. Schwartz, and K.E. Kenworthy. 2017. Zoysiagrass (Zoysia spp.) history, utilization, and improvement in the United States: A review. Crop Science 57:S37-S73. (doi: 10.2135/cropsci2017.02.0074)


Mike Fidanza, PhD, is a professor of Plant and Soil Science at Pennsylvania State University, Berks Campus. Cale Bigelow, PhD, is a professor of Turfgrass Science and Ecology in the Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Purdue University in Indiana. They are teaming to provide a Rooted in Research article for each issue of Turf News.


a All photos courtesy of Mike Fidanza, PhD.


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