Actually thats exactly what those grass and bush models are is six planes with grass textures on them, feel free to use the textures!
Nice job- you are doing great- good luck!
The textures are good. Maybe it’s my personal preferance, but I wouldn’t intersect many planes to get a 360 degrees viewing angle on a grass patch. I would place them in a triangle or a circle and rotate one of the top corners of the plane to make it appear less flat(which also adds depth from other viewing angles). Also fill few of the gaps with different sizes and shapes of the grass. The idea is to make it look good from a top viewing angle. Here is an example: 
any idea why they took out drop onto ground in blender? kinda sucks that i cant use that anymore
so intersecting is bad, curvy realism is good, i will get right on it!
Hand-placing will still get the most desired graphical result. You can turn on the snap to vertices or faces or use the vertex colors for particles and converting particles into a mesh. A good level-design starts from the tiniest of details and thinking about the first impression that the player will get.
I have achieved what i would be happy with using dupli verts and faces and then making the duplis real, mainly, an empty object to spawn grass or a tree when nearby the camera
Well, here is an example of circularly placed foliage. The shadows are baked into textures and grass is animated with a lattice and shape keys.
And a screenshot of the method to create the textures. Basically an ortho cam the models placed at the desired UV location.
is the project still running?