Buffalograss

Female-only clones that never throw a seedhead and never shed pollen — the closest buffalograss gets to a manicured lawn.

Best For: A Zone 4 to 7 yard in the Plains, the Front Range, the Midwest or the drier transition zone where you want buffalograss to look deliberate rather than wild. It earns its price where someone in the house has a pollen allergy, where chinch bugs have hit before, or where the goal is to almost never start the mower.

Tradeoff: There's no seed — you buy live plants, so a 1,000-square-foot lawn starts at six to fourteen plug trays and fills in over a season.

The only buffalograss you can plant from a bag, and by far the cheapest way to cover a large dry yard.

Best For: A big, full-sun yard in the dry country west of about the 25-inch rain line — the Plains, the Front Range, western Kansas and Oklahoma, the Southwest — anywhere in Zones 4 through 8 where sodding the whole thing would cost more than the lawn is worth. Best if you can plant in late spring and wait out a slow first season.

Tradeoff: Roughly half the plants you grow will be male, so you'll mow every one to two weeks all summer just to cut off seedheads that a clone lawn never grows.

The lowest-water lawn grass sold anywhere, with a fine, bermuda-like surface built for desert heat.

Best For: Southern California, Arizona, southern Nevada, New Mexico and West Texas — full sun, real heat, and usually a watering restriction. Zones 7 through 10, on a yard where a quarter inch of water a week has to be enough.

Tradeoff: It's winter-tender, and the failure is total rather than gradual — '609' and 'Prairie' winterkill completely in Colorado.