Wimbledon grass hack makes water 'wetter' and keeps courts green at SW19

Grass chiefs at Wimbledon have figured out an ingenious way to make water ‘wetter’ - to keep down soaring bills.

As water bills rise across the country, SW19, despite its ample funds, is also counting the pennies. Across England and Wales, as of April, water bills were due to rise on average of £10 per month. And Head of Horticulture at the All England Club, Neil Stubley, said the grounds were ‘absolutely’ feeling the pinch.

So water gurus at the Championships have been working on ways to better conserve water.

“We have a wetting agent program,” he said. “Which essentially is something that we can spray into the soil. It sounds a weird term, but it makes water wetter.

“So the surface tension of a water molecule, a plant root system, at a certain point, can’t penetrate it as the moisture gets smaller, because the surface tension’s more. We can adjust that so that actually a plant root can tap into that water. So when you think the soil is really, really dry, our grasses can still get water that’s maybe not available to (other plants)."

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Asked if that was to keep water bills down, he said: “Absolutely. We don’t want to be using water if we don’t need to be using it. So if we can use the least amount, and rely on Mother Nature outside of the Championships for the grass court season, then we will.

“If we feel that because of the Championships, because we’ve got exact numbers and criteria that we want to stick to, we have to make sure that our target irrigation is absolutely spot on. So some days it will be less, more, it will never be an exact science.”

He jokingly added he did not have to pay the bills, so wasn’t sure how much they had increased at the championships. Stubley referred to a predicted drought in 2012, which changed the types of plants his team of 20 now plant around the grounds, despite there being plenty of rain by the time of the tournament.

“On the back of that, we actually made a conscious effort that the hydrangeas – and those types of flowers we’ve used historically here that actually do need a lot of water to survive – if you look at the grounds over the last 10 to 15 years, although they’re still in areas, there’s a lot less of them.”

He added, “All the research that we do with our grasses, we’re now selecting grasses that are more wear-tolerant, more drought-tolerant grasses that we can use in the UK that have been used elsewhere.”

After a scorching opening two days at the Championships, temperatures have dropped by around 10C today and much-needed rain this morning prompted queues at the official shop, where £40 umbrellas were selling at speed.