Thanks Benjamin,
thanks BIGAL3D but my original post had a typo "orange" :-) for strange...
Anyhow, I changed to randomize by tile in the material itself and all was well after that.
I will also try your option but I rarely go in to UV edit mode.
In this case I am modelling a terrain as mesh surfaces with cubic mappings and displacements. I usually set a material tag to cubic and add a UV tag set to fit the mesh. The latter to be able to scatter by a noise map. Without a UV tag noise maps don't work to scale or distribute scattered geometry.
The thing is I usually only have a few hours to do an image provided I get the building model in C4D. The terrain takes me about an hour and setting up the vegetation another hour. The few hours left are for setting up the sun and sky, rendering and editing the rendered image in LR. See attachment with the distorted texture. I used moss to render grass for this aerial view. This image is still a bit sketchy and not finished yet.
So the less hassle it is to sort out stuff the better. That is something Coronarender should invest in as much as possible. Ease of use. The whole design process of even large buildings is often done in less than a month with dozens of iterations going on. Imagine the speed at which stuff is rendered out at busy office.
I am happy though that at the forum Corona staff has huge knowhow and willing to help out. Makes a big difference. Even though at the office Twinmotion and Lumion have become the "go to" presentation tools I am still asked to do the more or less architectural images.