How to establish and maintain the turf playgrounds in Japan

Abstract

Recently, tremendous interests and expectations on turf playground are growing nationally among the educators, landscapers and general citizen because of environmental and educational benefits of turfgrass. However, establishing and sustaining the turf playground is not easily accomplished due to several reasons including the limited land availability, heavy traffic, financial difficulty and a luck of turf management culture, etc. In this study, turf management program of both public schools and private schools in central Arkansas, USA was investi-gated using the questionnaires in addition to oral interviews. Central Arkansas was chosen for investigation because the climatic conditions such as average temperature and turfgrass species used are relatively similar to those of western Japan. The purpose of this study was to learn about the school turf management system in the United States, which could be helpful for designing the sustainable turf playgrounds in Japan.