It was William Shakespeare who, in the 1590s, wrote the words: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

According to the fathers of Romeo and Juliet, a name means a great deal.

A name also means much in the turfgrass world, where it is not every day that a product’s moniker is changed after it is released. The University of Georgia recently changed the name of its SeaBreeze variety of vegetative seashore paspalum turfgrass to SeaScape. The name change was prompted when officials at Georgia learned that their new variety of paspalum, released almost two years ago, shared the same name (albeit without an uppercase “B”) with a variety of creeping fescue from Pure Seed of Canby, Oregon.

Pure Seed’s Seabreeze was initially launched in 1992, with its successor, Seabreeze GT, coming on the market in 2003. The University of Georgia release came in January 2023.

Georgia turf breeders chose the SeaBreeze label to continue the university’s tradition of naming its salt-tolerant paspalum varieties with the “Sea” prefix paired with a word that invokes images of waterfront golf courses and lawns. Earlier releases have labels such as SeaIsle 1, SeaIsle 2000, SeaIsle Supreme and SeaStar.

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