For lawn grasses, tall fescue (also called turf-type tall fescue) is the recommended cool-season lawn type, not Kentucky bluegrass, though the latter does provide a couple useful features when it's mixed into a tall fescue lawn (by only about 10% or so). Many sod sources as well as bagged seed mixes will contain a small amount of Kentucky bluegrass with the tall fescue. Still, we don't have local research as to which native grasses might make a suitable lawn alternative, since they'd need to both tolerate moderate to heavy foot traffic and periodic mowing.

Nimblewill is a warm-season grass (so, like zoysia lawns, would go dormant and turn completely brown between the fall frost and about mid-spring) that is native and which sometimes colonizes lawns as a weed. It might work as a lawn alternative if you prefer to grow something native, but we don't know how it would handle regular foot traffic. It does seem to handle mowing reasonably well since it's typically a successful lawn weed in that regard, not dying out with repeated mowing when the rest of the lawn is cut. We do not know of sources for buying Nimblewill seed, since it's predominantly still considered to be a weed in lawns. (Our own web content still treats it as such, though we may adjust that in the future.)

There are some cool-season native grasses, though to our knowledge, they have not been trialed locally as a lawn substitute either. Cool-season native grasses, like the non-native tall fescue, would be in active growth in spring and early autumn, but be dormant in summer heat and drought, and again during winter, though may stay more green in winter than warm-season grasses do.

Fine fescue, while also non-native, is typically the lawn grass used for low-maintenance areas with little foot traffic. It does not need (or want) regular mowing, and also does best with minimal fertilizer and less irrigation during drought. If you prefer not to mow much, we do not recommend mowing at a height over four inches (and unless you were using a tool that wasn't a mower, mowers usually don't have the option to cut much higher than 4 inches), and instead just use a species that will stay about the height you want. Fine fescue grass blades can arch over into a mounded tuft as it matures, so the overall height will probably stay at or under 9 inches, even uncut.

You can have a similar look to a fine fescue lawn using some sedges (genus Carex). Many sedge species are native in Maryland (though not all are easy to source), and a recent study by Mt. Cuba Center, a public garden in Delaware that focuses on native plants, looked into which performed well in certain conditions and which tolerated mowing. They were not prioritizing lawn substitution when conducting the study, but the information in the linked publication may be useful if you want to try a sedge lawn. Sedges are usually available as starter plants (plugs) and not seed, but that may change as they get more popular with native plant gardeners, though it takes time to build up inventory of species popularized by that study. Although long-term maintenance costs of a sedge lawn may be quite low, the initial start-up costs may be much higher than for a "traditional" fescue or zoysia lawn given the reduced availability and longer time it may take the sedges to fill in and provide good ground coverage.

Miri