Speaker 1: Golfers have strong feelings about trees. Take the venue of
Speaker 1: last week's US Open, Oakmont Country Club. Between the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties and twenty ten's Oakmont removed almost all of the
Speaker 1: trees on its golf course, and today in twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: this is still a controversial subject. Some people are still
Speaker 1: mad about it. So in this episode, we're talking about
Speaker 1: trees on golf courses, why they get planted, why they
Speaker 1: might be removed, and what effect they have on the game.
Speaker 1: My guest is Bradley Klein, a veteran golf architecture writer
Speaker 1: and consultant. Brad has been thinking about the tree issue
Speaker 1: for decades now, and few people are more knowledgeable about it.
Speaker 1: I'm Garrett Morrison and this is designing golf. So, Bradley,
Speaker 1: in addition to writing prolifically about golf courses, you have
Speaker 1: a lot of experience consulting with clubs about golfer chitecture.
Speaker 1: I assume some of these consultations involved tree studies. Am
Speaker 1: I right about that?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Sure?
Speaker 1: What do those usually involve? How does that process look?
Speaker 2: So? Without? You know, I could get into various details,
Speaker 2: but this started about twenty What is it now? It's
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five. So it started twenty five years ago
Speaker 2: when I started writing about trees and realizing that almost
Speaker 2: every course I was looking at, including one I was
Speaker 2: a member at, was completely overtreate. And at this time
Speaker 2: there were already rumors are not the right word, but
Speaker 2: murmurings of what was going on at Oakmont, which was
Speaker 2: just beginning to under the guise of their superintendent, Marque
Speaker 2: Markuns surreptitiously with They had the sod squad out there
Speaker 2: at four in the morning with a couple of boxes
Speaker 2: of Krispy kremes the laborers and they were taking down
Speaker 2: trees and taking the root ball out and sotting it
Speaker 2: over and tapping it down, and first group out wouldn't
Speaker 2: even notice anything. Took a while for that to happen,
Speaker 2: but for them to get caught, But that was the start,
Speaker 2: and generally, you know, I was very involved in the
Speaker 2: restoration movement, if you will, early on as a writer,
Speaker 2: championing that and trying to undo in my mind and editorially,
Speaker 2: what I had seen was a lot of reckless modernization
Speaker 2: of golf courses, whether lengthening, stretching, overgrowing, making them straight
Speaker 2: and losing a lot of the character, and so I
Speaker 2: started writing about that and then I got called. One
Speaker 2: of the early ones was Sciota actually nineteen ninety nine
Speaker 2: or two thousand. I still have these reports, and you know,
Speaker 2: you sort of walk them through what was happening, and
Speaker 2: you try to develop criteria of evaluation. And it helped
Speaker 2: listening to Gil Hands back then. I have known Gil
Speaker 2: since nineteen ninety four when he was probably making five
Speaker 2: hundred bucks a day on a dozer over at Engineers
Speaker 2: Golf Club on Long Island, and we spent a lot
Speaker 2: of time walking and talking, and I went to a
Speaker 2: presentation and he developed these criteria that I'll never forget
Speaker 2: about the priorities when you're looking at trees, and it
Speaker 2: was a matter of the agronomic impact, impact on strategic
Speaker 2: flexibility of the golf course, the esthetics of the view shed,
Speaker 2: the health of the tree, and also issues of safety
Speaker 2: of personnel on the golf course. And so you start
Speaker 2: thinking about these trees and what they're doing, and the
Speaker 2: species and the appropriateness, and you start realizing that most
Speaker 2: golf courses, and this is in the northeast, Midwest, Southeast,
Speaker 2: were wildly overtreated. You know, in my background. I think
Speaker 2: it's helpful to know. I'm an educator by training. I
Speaker 2: have a PhD in political science. I was a university professor.
Speaker 2: I'm very dogmatic in the classroom. It's probably why I quit.
Speaker 2: I got frustrated. But I believe in things and I
Speaker 2: believe in advocating them, and frankly, I didn't think that
Speaker 2: was happening in the golf industry. I thought the other
Speaker 2: people writing about golf architecture, in particular Ron Whitten, to
Speaker 2: be fair, he's very knowledgeable, incredibly knowledgeable, but he wasn't advocating.
Speaker 2: He was more the kind of a neutral attorney sifting
Speaker 2: through information, and I was more going to be an agitator.
Speaker 2: And I had a platform at Golf Week. I was
Speaker 2: writing articles like crazy, and I've had a following. You know,
Speaker 2: as you know about five or six percent of golfers
Speaker 2: really care about architecture in an unbelievably passionate way. And
Speaker 2: I had people who started asking me about, Hey, what
Speaker 2: do you think about our golf course. I said, well,
Speaker 2: let me go take a look. So I started.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And obviously, you know, as part of the larger
Speaker 1: restoration movement, tree management programs were a big part of
Speaker 1: that often the most controversial piece of any given restoration projects.
Speaker 1: So well, we'll get into some of the details of
Speaker 1: why trees might be removed or managed. I think that
Speaker 1: that sort of Gilhand's playbook that you briefly refer to
Speaker 1: would be a good structure for us in talking about
Speaker 1: trees on golf courses. But I'm curious, first of all
Speaker 1: about the history of trees on golf courses. Maybe we
Speaker 1: could just give a broad overview of how things have
Speaker 1: evolved over the past one hundred years or so as
Speaker 1: it relates to trees on golf courses. What were some
Speaker 1: of the attitudes of Golden age golf architects toward trees
Speaker 1: on inland golf courses specifically, and by Golden Age I
Speaker 1: mean the architects who are working primarily in the first
Speaker 1: four decades of the twentieth century. What were their feelings,
Speaker 1: both expressed and implicit through their work about trees and golf.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. The first thing is that
Speaker 2: trees weren't even an issue until golf moved inland. So
Speaker 2: the basic structure of the game is founded upon coastal
Speaker 2: golf links. Golf and even though it's a small, tiny
Speaker 2: percentage of the golf courses. It's a strong component of
Speaker 2: the early foundation of understanding what was going on, and
Speaker 2: golf architecture really was trying to take those design principles
Speaker 2: of flexibility, of using the wind, of using ground contour,
Speaker 2: of using hollows that had been created, and taking it
Speaker 2: to a land that was not ideally suited, but that's
Speaker 2: where people were, namely inland, and so around just before
Speaker 2: the turn of the century, lateeteen century, you would say
Speaker 2: the game started moving into onto land that really needed
Speaker 2: to be worked. It had to be drained, it had
Speaker 2: to be cleared as well. Now, initially many of the
Speaker 2: sites that were picked were treeless. I'll give you an
Speaker 2: example because I just saw at Huntercombe, which is Lillly Park,
Speaker 2: Junior's great inland course an hour west of Heathrow Airport,
Speaker 2: was a completely treeless site, fairly flat, low lying, and
Speaker 2: the contours that were created were essentially ditches and hollows
Speaker 2: and barrow pits for coal and for mining that had
Speaker 2: been established on site. And he worked the whole golf
Speaker 2: course around it. And the trees came in later, but
Speaker 2: it's not till a tree clearing was required for wooded
Speaker 2: sites on farmland where you had rows of trees that
Speaker 2: had been used as boundaries. You know, when you're assembling
Speaker 2: a golf course property of one hundred and fifty eight
Speaker 2: as you're often involving different parcels of land that are
Speaker 2: divided by trees, and that's when the removal process started
Speaker 2: to take place in a heavy handed way. Ross was
Speaker 2: one of those. Mackenzie was similar McDonald. As I recall
Speaker 2: not most of them didn't write very much. You know,
Speaker 2: the writings we have are from the Occasional Polemical book
Speaker 2: by Hunter or McKenzie and McDonald. Ross himself wrote very
Speaker 2: very little, but they made it Tillinghast was more prolific
Speaker 2: about this. They made it clear that trees were acceptable
Speaker 2: and appropriate, but not to be central. They had a character,
Speaker 2: you know, they that first of all, delineating the boundary
Speaker 2: of the property the occasional dog leg around. But I
Speaker 2: think it was Ross who said that it was a
Speaker 2: mistake to make a tree a central component of the
Speaker 2: strategy of a golf hall. So while they accepted, and
Speaker 2: partly that's an economic when you when you when you're
Speaker 2: on a site with trees, you decide how much you're
Speaker 2: going to cut down. They wanted generous fairways, and it
Speaker 2: has to be said that even their inland golf courses
Speaker 2: back then were fifty sixty yard white fareaways. The narrowing
Speaker 2: of fairways was a function of the introduction of fairway irrigation,
Speaker 2: which could only throw water thirty yards, and everything else
Speaker 2: outside of that starff. So they started to fill that
Speaker 2: space of dead grass. You know, they put an irrigation
Speaker 2: system and thinking it's going to irrigate the golf course
Speaker 2: and only irrigated thirty yards. Everything else was dying. So
Speaker 2: they then filled it up with trees. And that was
Speaker 2: after World War two for the most part. So you
Speaker 2: look at the history of the planting, which is part
Speaker 2: of this. The aggressive planting program didn't take place till
Speaker 2: after World War two. So what it tells you is
Speaker 2: when you look at the early images, and we do
Speaker 2: this all the time, I'm thinking of a wonderful Donald
Speaker 2: Ross's a nine hole golf course in Massachusetts called Whitonsville,
Speaker 2: and there's an aerial from nineteen twenty seven twenty eight,
Speaker 2: and it shows about eight pine trees out there, all
Speaker 2: clustered between the first green and the sixth faaraway, and
Speaker 2: that's it. Everything is also wide open, and the heart
Speaker 2: was they had, by the way, were many of them
Speaker 2: graceful oaks and American elm. And the American elm was
Speaker 2: a fantastic golf tree because it had deep roots, It
Speaker 2: had a tall main trunk with a beautiful kind of
Speaker 2: champagne glass canopy, and you could play under and around
Speaker 2: the whole under and around the tree. And so as
Speaker 2: a majestic, gracious tree, it actually allowed you to incorporate
Speaker 2: that and still have an element of grace and beauty
Speaker 2: and strategy all combined with that kind of a tree. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: when the American elm started to get the Dutch elm
Speaker 2: disease around and after World War Two, and of them
Speaker 2: came down on golf courses, they were replaced. People got nervous.
Speaker 2: They started planting spruce and sugar maples and swamp maples
Speaker 2: and all sorts of trees that were not indigenous to
Speaker 2: clutter up or fill up the golf course. Brookside Country
Speaker 2: Club was a great example of this in Canton, Ohio.
Speaker 2: It was one of my early projects that I was
Speaker 2: involved with. And you go out there on the aerials
Speaker 2: from nineteen twenty it's just sand, open blast areas, no
Speaker 2: trees anywhere. And by nineteen fifty seven, fifty eight, these
Speaker 2: kind of you know, it looked like German prisoners of
Speaker 2: war had planted trees every nineteen and a half feet
Speaker 2: in a dead straight row down both sides of every fairway.
Speaker 2: So by the time television came along to show what
Speaker 2: golf courses looked like, people thought that that look of
Speaker 2: the enclosed, narrow, thirty yard wide, straight tree covered canopy
Speaker 2: was the norm, and it wasn't.
Speaker 1: So you've you've laid out some history for us here.
Speaker 1: You know, we start in the first deck of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, where the general attitude of most golf architects
Speaker 1: is that trees can be appropriate on a golf course,
Speaker 1: but not too many. We're certainly not going to have
Speaker 1: rows of trees enclosing golf holes because that sort of
Speaker 1: chokes out the character of the land and of the
Speaker 1: strategy of the whole and creates other problems as well.
Speaker 1: But then in the post World War II period we
Speaker 1: have these planting programs, sometimes motivated motivated by so called beautification.
Speaker 1: Other times you refer to the to the elm disease,
Speaker 1: the elm blight that happened in the middle of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, and sometimes clubs would react to that by
Speaker 1: planting a bunch of trees to replace the lost elms.
Speaker 1: Except those trees were not nearly as well suited to
Speaker 1: golf as the elms, nor as beautiful, And so we
Speaker 1: have a variety of factors leading to pretty aggressive planting
Speaker 1: programs at many classic golf courses in the fifties, sixties,
Speaker 1: and seventies. Now we get to the eighties and nineties,
Speaker 1: and this is when you're starting to enter the industry
Speaker 1: yourself and writing about golf courses. I've always been curious,
Speaker 1: what do you think are the roots of the tree
Speaker 1: management programs that started in the nineties and really picked
Speaker 1: up pace in the twenty first century. And specifically, I've
Speaker 1: always sort of wondered when I read about the history
Speaker 1: of Oakmont's tree removal program, it always the story always
Speaker 1: begins with, well, the club's board and green chairmen were
Speaker 1: strongly in support of restoration and removing trees, and the
Speaker 1: members really weren't. And I've always wondered, Okay, well, why
Speaker 1: was the club's board in support of it in the
Speaker 1: first How did momentum build in the first place to
Speaker 1: start removing trees at Oakmont and at many other clubs.
Speaker 1: I don't know what do you have to say about that.
Speaker 1: What do you think the what do you think the
Speaker 1: kind of underlying factors are that that led to tree
Speaker 1: management becoming a popular process.
Speaker 2: Well, I don't think it's I wouldn't say it's popular.
Speaker 2: What I would say it's widely accepted among people who
Speaker 2: know what they're talking about. So the couple There are
Speaker 2: lots of different strands and converging moments here, So I'll
Speaker 2: give one. One stream is that restoration generically became a buzzword.
Speaker 2: I give the founding moment, and I'm proud to have
Speaker 2: caddied there at the eighty six US Open at Hinnacock.
Speaker 2: That was a big watershed in the moment in which
Speaker 2: we discovered at one hundred year old golf course could
Speaker 2: still be relevant.
Speaker 1: And that was the first US Open to be held
Speaker 1: at Shinnacock since eighteen ninety six. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I mean you look back at it, it was
Speaker 2: it was heavily trigued a lot more than now, but
Speaker 2: still it was really cool to go out there and
Speaker 2: the wind swept links courses. You know, it was windy,
Speaker 2: it was very difficult, lots of fescue a little tall
Speaker 2: off everywhere, and it was rough conditions and it was
Speaker 2: not what you would call a well manicured, beautiful golf course.
Speaker 2: They were still back then, they were still triplex mowing
Speaker 2: the greens and gang mowing the fairways and fairly rough conditions.
Speaker 2: But the point is that the USJ made a commitment there,
Speaker 2: maybe by accident, whatever, it doesn't matter what their motive was.
Speaker 2: The impact was people started talking. And then two years
Speaker 2: later eighty eight the country club at Brookline was really
Speaker 2: important because that's where Rhys Jones made restoration a focal
Speaker 2: point of his presence, and he spent a lot of
Speaker 2: time there and established his repation as a restoration is
Speaker 2: now in retrospect, the kind of work he did is
Speaker 2: now seen as a little bit timid and passe, but
Speaker 2: for what was going on in the industry at the time,
Speaker 2: the use of those fescue mounds, for example, reclaiming some
Speaker 2: of the surface some tree management in areas that were
Speaker 2: heavily shaded that open also became for marketing purposes alone.
Speaker 2: Good reclaimed the reputation and more importantly, that word entered
Speaker 2: into the vocabulary, and that's really what started the conversation
Speaker 2: about these things. Now. The other thing that happened is
Speaker 2: that with environmental management and crackdown by the EPA and
Speaker 2: the use of chemical pesticides and basic heavy chemistry mercuries
Speaker 2: for example, and there was a concern about the overuse
Speaker 2: of chemicals on golf courses. The environmental movement was manifesting itself.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of resistance in the industry to
Speaker 2: be fair, but still people realized that from a cost
Speaker 2: management standpoint and from a toxicity level, because a lot
Speaker 2: of environments now were being tested. New York State came
Speaker 2: out with a report called Toxic Fairways in the I
Speaker 2: think mid nineties that basically was a scathing attack upon
Speaker 2: the overuse of fertilization and chemistry on Long Island golf
Speaker 2: courses where the water table, you know, golf courses were
Speaker 2: sitting on an aquifer that people were using for drinking water.
Speaker 2: So there became more of a conversation about, well, maybe
Speaker 2: we need to back off this, and then the superintendent's
Speaker 2: developed a more culturally oriented program of relying upon sunshine
Speaker 2: and wind and sand and top dressing for not organic
Speaker 2: but more or cultural practices as they were called. They
Speaker 2: were cheaper, they were efficient, they lasted longer, and so
Speaker 2: you had now a realization that there are things in
Speaker 2: the environment that we can manage without chemical applications that
Speaker 2: could help promote healthy turf. And a lot of that
Speaker 2: was simply doing shade studies. You didn't have the apps
Speaker 2: back then, but you could figure out where sunlight was
Speaker 2: and you could realize that because of the azimuth in
Speaker 2: the shoulder season the sunshine was lower, you had much
Speaker 2: more shade issues. Shade tolerance was a big issue turf grass,
Speaker 2: particularly on grain. So the superintendent's from a micromanagement standpoint,
Speaker 2: realized they needed to do something and they started paring
Speaker 2: back trees fairly modestly, but still because if you want
Speaker 2: bent grass, you need eight hours, You need eight hours
Speaker 2: of sunlight. If you're just going along with the perennial poe,
Speaker 2: you can get by on four, five, six hours. But
Speaker 2: if you want quality turf, if you want greens roll,
Speaker 2: you know, people don't realize the conditioning has changed so much.
Speaker 2: Back in nineteen seventy seven, Oakmont was the fastest golf
Speaker 2: course in the Country stip meter speed registered by the
Speaker 2: USJA was nine point eight. It was two feet ahead
Speaker 2: of Augusta National. Augusta National was averaging seven point seven.
Speaker 2: That's in nineteen seventy seven, before they converted. They're greens
Speaker 2: at Augusta. But in any case, conditioning was different. So
Speaker 2: when expectations went up and it's like we would like
Speaker 2: something faster, the new vents were a little better the old.
Speaker 2: The old perennial poem was not performing as well. Pen
Speaker 2: cross bent grass was not going to deliver anything faster
Speaker 2: than eight and a half or nine. Once you want
Speaker 2: to go to ten or eleven, you needed the new
Speaker 2: high performance bent grasses. They needed much more sunlight, they
Speaker 2: needed more top dressing. All of these converging factors and
Speaker 2: demands and expectations. Television as well. People started to see
Speaker 2: really cool golf courses on television and thought, why can't
Speaker 2: we have it at our house? You know, they kind
Speaker 2: of call it the Augusta syndrome, but it's more popular
Speaker 2: than that. It's realizing that, gee, we could be doing
Speaker 2: better than what we have and so and the other
Speaker 2: thing that happened is that superintendents became professionally trained you know,
Speaker 2: they used to be greenkeepers, make in genes in they
Speaker 2: were like farmers. I can remember when I started writing
Speaker 2: in the industry, superintendents were making thirty thirty five thousand
Speaker 2: a year maintenance budgets for two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand. Now,
Speaker 2: you know, the numbers are astronomical, But the point is
Speaker 2: that the superintendents are now professionally trained turf grass scientists,
Speaker 2: many of them, many more than ever. I would say
Speaker 2: most have four year degrees or at least they've been
Speaker 2: through a two year turf program, so they have a
Speaker 2: better understanding of war, chemistry, sunlight, the factors that are
Speaker 2: really required. And so the whole industry has changed. The
Speaker 2: professionalism has changed, set of expectations have changed, and then
Speaker 2: the sense of travel. I do think that the golf
Speaker 2: course ratings process has exposed people with better photography and
Speaker 2: video and media. People are more aware of what's going
Speaker 2: on with other courses that are really cool that they
Speaker 2: either visit or that they would dream about visiting. I
Speaker 2: think that Band in Dunes had a lot to do
Speaker 2: with it as well, because that essentially popularized the idea
Speaker 2: of links golf in a way that had previously only
Speaker 2: been available to those who had gone to Scotland. Of course,
Speaker 2: as you know, or most of us know, getting to
Speaker 2: Bandon is just as difficult as getting to Scotland, but
Speaker 2: at least it's in the United States and it doesn't
Speaker 2: involve quite the schlepp. But the availability of that kind
Speaker 2: of a golf really struck a nerve with a certain
Speaker 2: percentage of elite people who then I think became more
Speaker 2: prominent in decision making in their home course. And so
Speaker 2: what happens at every club to get to your I
Speaker 2: knew i'd get to your point, is that the people
Speaker 2: making decisions about these things were more and more exposed
Speaker 2: to a variety of golf courses that had not been
Speaker 2: the case at every club that I've been to. The
Speaker 2: people who are happiest with the old Parkland tree laced,
Speaker 2: you know, heavy polar conditions are the ones who don't travel.
Speaker 2: They've spent forty years playing this golf course. They think
Speaker 2: it's always been that way. They love it. They had
Speaker 2: their same group, they play five days a week. They
Speaker 2: remember the tree that they bounced the shot off of,
Speaker 2: or you know whatever. They remember all these things. They
Speaker 2: don't want anything to budget they're not making decisions anymore.
Speaker 2: The people making decisions are they're course raiders. They've been debandoned.
Speaker 2: They've gone to Cabot, they've gone to stream Song, they've
Speaker 2: been to Scotland, they're going to Australia now. So there's
Speaker 2: much more what I call architectural literacy. They're reading the
Speaker 2: books that we write. They understand that superintendents are professionals.
Speaker 2: They're not bossing them around. They're starting to listen to them.
Speaker 2: And the superintendents have become better about communicating and a
Speaker 2: little bolder in their articulation of their expertise and what
Speaker 2: they need. That's the other thing. They're more professional. So
Speaker 2: the people who are making decisions have changed. I think
Speaker 2: increasingly we've found that a more informed decision making apparatus
Speaker 2: has developed at these clubs, so that they're working with
Speaker 2: superintendents rather than telling them, you know, hey, you should
Speaker 2: mold the left side of the fairways wider because I'm
Speaker 2: hooking the ball and I'm tired of being in the roof.
Speaker 2: That's what you You don't see that as much. So
Speaker 2: it's a big, big change at many, many levels.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to put a bow on the historical
Speaker 1: narrative here. The rise of the superintendent, which you've referred to,
Speaker 1: or the increased prominence and education of the superintendent, is
Speaker 1: a big part of this story because now you see
Speaker 1: superintendent's the head superintendent, being often the most important and
Speaker 1: in some cases the highest paid employee of a given club.
Speaker 1: That wasn't really the case in the past. They have
Speaker 1: a lot more power now and a lot more authority,
Speaker 1: and what they're saying often is, well, listen, if you
Speaker 1: want me to use less chemicals, less inputs, less water,
Speaker 1: then we have got to get our turf in the sunlight.
Speaker 1: And if you want that turf to be of the
Speaker 1: highest quality, then it needs sunlight and air circulation. And
Speaker 1: if we have trees surrounding every hole and putting all
Speaker 1: of our turf in shade for most of the day,
Speaker 1: then we're not going to have outstanding turf conditions, especially
Speaker 1: if we want to reduce our dependency on chemicals and
Speaker 1: various other inputs. And so that's kind of the logic
Speaker 1: that has started to win the day a little bit here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one of the great moments I saw actually witnessed
Speaker 2: this conversation. A fella comes into the superintendent's office and says,
Speaker 2: you can't cut down the trees down? Can you manage
Speaker 2: this without the tree management? And the superintendent says, you're
Speaker 2: a dentist, right, yeah, I said, do you want to
Speaker 2: pull teeth without novercame You could do it, but you
Speaker 2: might kill the patient. And it was a great kind
Speaker 2: of response of a professional, and the guy backed off. Realized,
Speaker 2: you know, so I think the professionalization and I have
Speaker 2: to include the golf prost too, because they have you know,
Speaker 2: I noticed, starting about twenty five years ago, the PGA
Speaker 2: of America at the convention would start running seminars on architecture,
Speaker 2: on maintenance and instructing golf pros a little bit more
Speaker 2: about that component of it so that they are on
Speaker 2: the same path. And every club where there is ongoing
Speaker 2: tree management, there has to be a collaboration among the
Speaker 2: GM the golf professional, the superintendent, and the green chair.
Speaker 2: And the more they collaborate and they're starting to do that, well,
Speaker 2: they've been doing that for a long time. The architecte
Speaker 2: leads the conversation, but the professionalization of this relationship means
Speaker 2: that those people are listening to what's best for the
Speaker 2: facility rather than listening to who's going to make who
Speaker 2: on their board is going to help them keep their job.
Speaker 2: The boards are not effective in that kind of planning.
Speaker 2: Just people don't have the time, they don't have the expertise.
Speaker 2: They might have some expertise in financial management, but not
Speaker 2: in terms of the agronomics of it or in the
Speaker 2: strategic or historical site. So my job as an outsider
Speaker 2: was easy because I didn't you know, I would go
Speaker 2: in for a day or two for set fee. If
Speaker 2: they didn't like what I had to say, I don't care.
Speaker 2: I'm going to get paid anyway. So it's I had
Speaker 2: more latitude to say what I needed to say rather
Speaker 2: than someone who was a full time employee who was
Speaker 2: trying to get his kids through college and needed his job.
Speaker 2: So that gave me a tremendous freedom and I and
Speaker 2: then you begin to build allies with the resources that
Speaker 2: you have, and all of a sudden, the superintendent feels like, boy,
Speaker 2: nice to be able to talk to someone about this
Speaker 2: sort of thing because they know these things and they've
Speaker 2: got their network of some people. But that network is
Speaker 2: getting has been steadily getting bigger. So and again the
Speaker 2: travel the band and Dunes kind of experienced the television
Speaker 2: exposure of the websites that golf club, Atlas and fried
Speaker 2: Egg and that kind of conversational stream has just been
Speaker 2: absolutely crucial. I'm not pandering here those names. Your names
Speaker 2: come up all the time when I'm meeting with clubs
Speaker 2: about things that they've seen. They did not have those
Speaker 2: resources thirty years ago, so I think the social media
Speaker 2: component of it has also created a reassurance that they're
Speaker 2: on the right track.
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Speaker 1: let's get back to the episode. In any case, I
Speaker 1: want to get to some of the specific topics that
Speaker 1: are often covered in discussions of tree management programs. As
Speaker 1: we've mentioned a couple of times, Gil Hants has kind
Speaker 1: of his taxonomy where he talks about agronomic benefits, strategic
Speaker 1: or playability concerns, he talks about esthetics, he talks about safety,
Speaker 1: he talks about the history of the site, and maybe
Speaker 1: missing a couple here and there, maybe budgetary concerns factor
Speaker 1: into this as well. So I'd like to touch on
Speaker 1: some of those. I think at this point most people
Speaker 1: listening to this podcast understand the basic agronomic calculus here.
Speaker 1: If you have light, if you have air circulation, you
Speaker 1: tend to have healthier turf with less intervention necessary from
Speaker 1: the ground staff. So why don't we talk about this
Speaker 1: in terms of ecology. Trees are obviously great assets to
Speaker 1: the environment, and so there is a sort of, in
Speaker 1: my opinion, simplistic, but a very common and common sensical
Speaker 1: argument that cutting down trees is bad for the environment.
Speaker 1: So why are we doing it at golf courses. What
Speaker 1: would be your response to that line of thinking when
Speaker 1: it comes to tree management at golf courses. What are
Speaker 1: the ecological implications? How do you think all that through?
Speaker 2: Okay, so here I'm going to differ a little bit
Speaker 2: with common currency. I don't think the Oakmont conversation is
Speaker 2: actually all that helpful. I think it's paralyzing part because
Speaker 2: the numbers that I've seen are crazy. People talk about
Speaker 2: ten thousand trees coming out, nothing like that.
Speaker 1: That's not the usual. Oakmont is a kind of outlier
Speaker 1: when it comes to well tree it's not a representative example. Really.
Speaker 2: Well two things. First of all, that number is completely irresponsible,
Speaker 2: So the actual number is far fewer, and at most places,
Speaker 2: what you're talking about is about two to three percent
Speaker 2: of the tree stock that's actually there. I just finished
Speaker 2: I'm working with a landscape architect. We're teamed up in
Speaker 2: the Campanelli. We're doing the restoration of Shuttle Metal Country Club,
Speaker 2: which is Willie Park Junior's first US golf course, which
Speaker 2: is why I went to Hunter Compe to see it.
Speaker 2: And we've done a tree management plan and now we're
Speaker 2: getting criticized because we didn't do enough, and I can't
Speaker 2: exactly count the number, but roughly of about three or
Speaker 2: four thousand trees on that site, we're looking at one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty and they're going to make a big
Speaker 2: difference because they're central, but the periphery the woods. So
Speaker 2: I think the first thing is that the Oakmont conversation
Speaker 2: makes it look like your tree you're removing all trees,
Speaker 2: whereas at most clubs. Now it varies, but in most
Speaker 2: clubs you're talking about a very marginal tweaking of the
Speaker 2: tree stock to open up views, to open up areas.
Speaker 2: But I'm I don't think it's helpful to talk about
Speaker 2: wholesale removal, and so the percentages that you're talking about
Speaker 2: are very small. The other thing is, while trees have
Speaker 2: an important ecology in terms of habitat, the cost agronomically
Speaker 2: and chemically of having them in areas where you're trying
Speaker 2: to grow turf grass produces reliance upon chemistry that infiltrates
Speaker 2: or has an impact on the environment in terms of
Speaker 2: the watershed. So you're trying to limit and remove and
Speaker 2: reduce the chemical reliance. The other thing is, of course
Speaker 2: you're going to be very mindful of certain special habitats
Speaker 2: of nesting sites of rare birds or nesting areas for
Speaker 2: eagles and egrets and so and habit water and watershed areas.
Speaker 2: So you're respecting a lot of the environmental issues. What
Speaker 2: you're dealing with is essentially the marginal intrusion of trees
Speaker 2: upon central lines of play, So the percentages are very small.
Speaker 2: The other thing is that in many cases what you're doing,
Speaker 2: I've seen lots of times where you propose an area
Speaker 2: where you're basically culling some of the trees that are
Speaker 2: impinging upon the growth patterns and the canopies of the
Speaker 2: large mature trees. And so what you're trying to do
Speaker 2: is essentially allow the more mature specimens to thrive because
Speaker 2: right now they're constricted either at the root there's root girdling,
Speaker 2: or there's a constrict of habit of the canopies. So
Speaker 2: you're kind of helping open up the area for more
Speaker 2: air movement than sunlight so that these trees can thrive.
Speaker 2: And so that's a big component of it as well.
Speaker 1: And often the native trees as well. Right if you
Speaker 1: have a bunch of non native trees surrounding an original
Speaker 1: indigenous tree, and you're remove the non natives around it,
Speaker 1: all of a sudden, the original native tree might be
Speaker 1: in a place to thrive.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So all of those are components of the responsible
Speaker 2: tree management. Okay, and that's why I don't the olkmont
Speaker 2: one is scarce people off. Rightly, that's not what's usually intended. Now,
Speaker 2: there are cases where it might be appropriate to do that,
Speaker 2: but and but that's an extreme exception.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about some playability or strategic issues. Again. I
Speaker 1: think there's a broad understanding that tree removal on classic
Speaker 1: golf courses that were designed to use with an angles
Speaker 1: restores those with an angles. If you have a dog
Speaker 1: leg hole to the right and you put in trees
Speaker 1: on the inside of that dog leg, the risk reward
Speaker 1: equation of trying to cut the dog leg is no
Speaker 1: longer there. That's a basic example. You remove the trees,
Speaker 1: you get back some options and some strategic complexity. That's appealing. Again,
Speaker 1: I think I think most people understand that at this point.
Speaker 1: Something that's interesting though to me is that there is
Speaker 1: another brand of this discussion that has to do with
Speaker 1: how golf courses are played by elite players. Now, if
Speaker 1: you take away trees from a golf course. Then elite
Speaker 1: players are especially now with the equipment that they use
Speaker 1: and the way that they hit the ball, are going
Speaker 1: to feast on most of those golf courses. If you
Speaker 1: don't constrict their line of play in some way or another,
Speaker 1: it's it's going to be tough for the golf course
Speaker 1: to defend itself. And I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: looked at Roy McElroy in the fourth round at the
Speaker 1: Masters and looked at his The most memorable shots that
Speaker 1: he hit that day one on the seventh hole where
Speaker 1: he kind of had to hit this miraculous shot around
Speaker 1: the trees to get to the green, and then of
Speaker 1: course on the fifteenth hole, where he had to shape
Speaker 1: a I don't even think it was a long iron.
Speaker 1: I think you hit a seven hour, but you know
Speaker 1: the thing with two and thirty yards or whatever it was.
Speaker 1: And but that shot only existed because those trees were there. Now,
Speaker 1: in the original design of Augusta National, you would have
Speaker 1: seen a couple of trees in approximately that position in
Speaker 1: the fifteenth fairway, but most of the fifteenth fairway would
Speaker 1: have been way more open, of course, and then those
Speaker 1: trees on the seventh hole that he played around wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been there initially. So I think people looked at
Speaker 1: those shots and said, well, trees have to be good
Speaker 1: for strategy, at least for elite players because or at
Speaker 1: least for the interest of the golf tournament. They have
Speaker 1: to be good because if they weren't there, then we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have gotten those shots. So I wonder how you
Speaker 1: balance in your thinking opening up strategic lines of play
Speaker 1: versus retaining some challenger the opportunity for spectacular recovery from
Speaker 1: great players.
Speaker 2: So the first thing I would tell you is that
Speaker 2: the trees you're talking about that were influential, particularly on fifteenth,
Speaker 2: that's a couple of trees somewhere the elite player hits
Speaker 2: the ball in the air. So if you're if your
Speaker 2: if your dominant obstacle is trying to create a hazard
Speaker 2: that an elite player has to deal with, the last
Speaker 2: thing you want to do is create a sixty foot
Speaker 2: high wall that they're going to hit over it anyway.
Speaker 2: If you have a big corner dog leg and it's
Speaker 2: two forty to carry, they'll launch it over there anyway.
Speaker 2: Whereas you're actually punishing the high handicapper or the mid
Speaker 2: handicapper much more because they can't hit it that high.
Speaker 2: They're chipping out all the time. So the first thing
Speaker 2: is if trees are your dominant form, if they're the
Speaker 2: dominant form of a hazard for creating interest, you're actually
Speaker 2: counterproductive by using trees in that way. The second thing is,
Speaker 2: I don't really think it's a helpful guide to use
Speaker 2: a tournament course as your guide for your every day
Speaker 2: golf course because that event takes place once a year.
Speaker 2: So I you know, how should it with this? At
Speaker 2: most clubs, one percent of play, no more than that
Speaker 2: takes place from the back teem. So if you're designing
Speaker 2: a golf course for the back te player in some
Speaker 2: big event, you've got your priorities wrong and you're going
Speaker 2: to go bankrop. So I like to think primarily of
Speaker 2: how is this going to play for the fee paying
Speaker 2: everyday golfer, and then where you can you put these
Speaker 2: elements in that for an event or for an elite player.
Speaker 2: But the most effective way to defeat an elite player
Speaker 2: is not in the air. It's on the ground. Because golf,
Speaker 2: my little mantra took me years to develop. This is
Speaker 2: that golf course architecture is what happens when the ball
Speaker 2: hits the ground. It's going to kick some way at
Speaker 2: oakmand it's going to get eaten up in the rough.
Speaker 2: It's going to kind of get some weird bounce that
Speaker 2: you might think is unfair. But by opening up contour,
Speaker 2: you create uncertainty. Whereas the elite player can pretty much
Speaker 2: dominate aerial space. They know where it's going. They have
Speaker 2: a launch monitor that every shot they're registering now, they
Speaker 2: know the spin rate, they know exactly how far it's
Speaker 2: going within one or two yards on irons. So if
Speaker 2: you focus on the aerial component to defeat a player,
Speaker 2: I think you're misguided and you're actually punishing the higher handicapper.
Speaker 2: The second thing is that the ground contour is what
Speaker 2: is most determinative. And finally, the hardest thing for a
Speaker 2: golf for a good golfer to do is to create
Speaker 2: a target when you get I'll put it this way.
Speaker 2: My favorite example seventeenth augusta National. They lost the part
Speaker 2: for they lost the Eisenhower Tree, which is about two
Speaker 2: to ten down the left side, which hung out over
Speaker 2: the fairway, and everybody said, oh my god, they're going
Speaker 2: to eat up the golf course. It's going to change it.
Speaker 2: So what happened. Average scoring didn't change, but the range
Speaker 2: of scores changed so that you had more birdies and
Speaker 2: more bogies because previously, with that Eisenhower tree, you either
Speaker 2: hit a little light cut or you took a three.
Speaker 2: Elite players hit three, which because they're desperately trying to
Speaker 2: hit the fairway. That tree is gone. The target area
Speaker 2: is larger, more of them hitting drivers. Some of them
Speaker 2: land in the adjacent in the adjoining I think seventh hole,
Speaker 2: others bail out to the right. So the actual impact
Speaker 2: on scoring was more diverse scoring. Although the average didn't change,
Speaker 2: the diversity of the scoring did. So. Gill showed Gil
Speaker 2: Hands showed me this at the TPC Boston. Once he
Speaker 2: showed me the data for the ninth hole, the par
Speaker 2: four doug let. He said, the wider they opened it
Speaker 2: and the more room there was, by definition, the fairway
Speaker 2: was a smaller percentage of the available space you were
Speaker 2: looking at. The more difficult or the more the less
Speaker 2: people a fair way that the ball wandered because they
Speaker 2: weren't able to focus, so they felt that they had
Speaker 2: more freedom. It was more difficult for them, so you're
Speaker 2: actually for the elite player, and they are in a
Speaker 2: completely different world. We're not talking about three four handicappers here.
Speaker 2: We're talking about plus six's and plus sevens who know
Speaker 2: exactly within one or two yards where their shots are going,
Speaker 2: and for them, the trees are less of an obstacle
Speaker 2: than the ground contours that they're dealing with.
Speaker 1: So I think, especially if it's firm, what elite players
Speaker 1: really don't like is that if they don't know what's
Speaker 1: happening once the ball lands. But I think you know
Speaker 1: what you're saying about the effect on elite players versus
Speaker 1: regular players of trees is really important to point out
Speaker 1: because that's an argument that many Golden Age architects made
Speaker 1: about trees. To them, trees were not a desirable hazard
Speaker 1: to use constantly because they are a relatively inequitable hazard,
Speaker 1: as in, they affect regular players more than they affect
Speaker 1: really good players. And the goal, the goal that a
Speaker 1: lot of Golden Age architects had was to figure out
Speaker 1: how to design courses that were fun to play, that
Speaker 1: were playable for regular players but still challenging for elite players.
Speaker 1: So you tried to find elements that were hard for
Speaker 1: elite players to navigate, but not, you know, necessarily preventative
Speaker 1: to a good time for regular players. And trees are
Speaker 1: pretty much exactly the opposite of that because.
Speaker 2: They dictate a line of play. As soon as you
Speaker 2: dictate a line of play, you take away the strategic flexibility.
Speaker 2: Just as it's a whole other conversation if you want
Speaker 2: to make a green interesting, take away the bunkers, because
Speaker 2: then the elite player has to think. As soon as
Speaker 2: they start thinking, they're in trouble, whereas myself mid handicapper
Speaker 2: would much prefer chipping or putting on short grass. Now
Speaker 2: that's a separate conversation, but to the extent that trees
Speaker 2: dictate a line of play. Having said that, tilling Has
Speaker 2: has a wonderful drawing that he provides in one of
Speaker 2: his articles from the twenties early twenties, and he says,
Speaker 2: there's a proper way to do a tree clearing. He
Speaker 2: shows a straight line with trees on each edge, you know,
Speaker 2: and he says that's not going to create any interest.
Speaker 2: He says, show that there's a slice opportunity where you
Speaker 2: open up the tree line on the right, there's a
Speaker 2: deeper one on the left. Have some variety in the
Speaker 2: tree line to conform to the way shots roll, so
Speaker 2: that you can recover. It was the art of recovery.
Speaker 2: And that's why if the trees are scattered, not dense forest,
Speaker 2: but if they're scattered light. You know, you think about
Speaker 2: Mickelson's famous shot on the thirteenth of Augusta, the six
Speaker 2: iron he hit to the green on the Saturday and
Speaker 2: the Masters that he won. He didn't make the putt,
Speaker 2: but it was a fantastic escape. It's only possible because
Speaker 2: there's room and a possibility. The most boring shot in
Speaker 2: the world is getting down with forearn and hitting it
Speaker 2: out sideways. That's not strategy, that's not a shot, the
Speaker 2: opportunity to create an escape, and so a lot of
Speaker 2: that has to do with the density of trees. You know.
Speaker 2: The right side of eleven at Augusta National, to me
Speaker 2: is a nightmare because there's a solid wall that they
Speaker 2: planted which obstructs, by the way, the view of spectators,
Speaker 2: and yet they left enough of an alleyway to the
Speaker 2: right of it. Tiger Woods always seemed to bail out
Speaker 2: there and then hit a shot. That is such an
Speaker 2: ill thought out way to go about the tree on
Speaker 2: fifteen on the left, brilliant thinning out the tree so
Speaker 2: that you have the opportunity to play that is appropriate.
Speaker 2: So those are the elements that also go into these
Speaker 2: sort of things.
Speaker 1: Scattered trees can be a very compelling hazard. And you know,
Speaker 1: even if you I know, there's a quote that everybody
Speaker 1: likes to take from Alistair McKenzie that talks about how
Speaker 1: these straight lines of tree down every side of the
Speaker 1: fairway or are not desirable. But mackenzie goes on to say,
Speaker 1: in a less quoted passage, well if you have scattered trees,
Speaker 1: if you have kind of these isolated little copses and
Speaker 1: things like that, those can be really really interesting. And
Speaker 1: so I think there's it's it's very important to introduce
Speaker 1: nuance to this discussion. It's not about clear cutting versus forest.
Speaker 1: There's an in between a state for a lot of
Speaker 1: golf courses that can be the ideal solution. All right. Finally,
Speaker 1: here I'd like to touch on aesthetics. This is such
Speaker 1: an interesting topic to me because the again there's a
Speaker 1: common sensical argument here that seems persuasive at first, but
Speaker 1: but might not be after further analysis. Many people might
Speaker 1: say trees are beautiful, therefore taking them down necessarily makes
Speaker 1: a golf course less beautiful. How do you go about
Speaker 1: responding to that.
Speaker 2: Well, the trees are not the golf course. So the
Speaker 2: really beautiful part part of being on a golf course
Speaker 2: is scanning the horizon line. Your eye moves left to right,
Speaker 2: and by the way, as the evidence of this to
Speaker 2: I love giving this example. I've done this all the
Speaker 2: time in lectures. When you have newscasters, you got the older,
Speaker 2: scruffy guy on the left and the beautiful young woman
Speaker 2: on the right. Your eye is always moving this way.
Speaker 2: In horror films, your eye is moving left to right,
Speaker 2: so the knife always comes in from the right. And Psycho,
Speaker 2: when Janet Ye gets killed in the shower, she's coming
Speaker 2: in from the left and the knife's coming in from
Speaker 2: the right. And the impact of your eye moving is
Speaker 2: part of the esthetic experience. That these these are actually
Speaker 2: true physiological components of the human body. The beauty of
Speaker 2: a golf course is when you can scan the horizon line.
Speaker 2: So that Dunlop White talks about raising the canopy, and he's.
Speaker 1: Lop White, the great longtime green chairman at Old Town Club.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, And He wrote about this a long time ago,
Speaker 2: about raising the canopy so you don't need to remove trees,
Speaker 2: but you can trim up the canopy so that you
Speaker 2: can see the horizon line and get a feel for
Speaker 2: how the land moves. A solid wall. You go to
Speaker 2: northern Minnesota and look at a solid wall of pine trees.
Speaker 2: There's nothing particularly beautiful about that. What's great is when
Speaker 2: you can when you're in the woods, then you see
Speaker 2: the sunlight and the clouds and the color of the
Speaker 2: sky through that. So that's the beauty of it. But
Speaker 2: an undifferentiated woodland that doesn't have the character so that
Speaker 2: you want to thin it out, open it up, raise
Speaker 2: the canopy being able to move this way, that's the
Speaker 2: beautiful part. And also the occasional view behind where you have,
Speaker 2: say an infinity edge, so you have this dramatic you
Speaker 2: know you're in North Carolina in the mountains and you
Speaker 2: have a and behind it is just miles of sky
Speaker 2: or ocean. I think about the at Sebonic, the fifteenth
Speaker 2: hole of the par five, where they gradually lifted the
Speaker 2: canopy behind so that you now have this beautiful vista
Speaker 2: of a great pliconic bay behind the green that they
Speaker 2: didn't have until they thinned that out. So what you're
Speaker 2: trying to do is use the landscape features as a
Speaker 2: canvas and not simply impose this vertical structure upon it,
Speaker 2: because that doesn't have any kind of distinctive, site specific
Speaker 2: esthetic to it. So a lot of it depends on
Speaker 2: what you're looking at and what's there and what you're hiding.
Speaker 2: But exposing that and allowing golfers to see that from
Speaker 2: various vantage points, that to me is where the beauty
Speaker 2: and the variety of a golf course come out. It's
Speaker 2: the most varied canvas of any sports field. The only
Speaker 2: regulation for the esthetic is or the structure is that
Speaker 2: the whole you're playing to is four and a quarter
Speaker 2: inches across. Everything else varies. You might as well utilize
Speaker 2: that opportunity to experience the landform and the sensibility of
Speaker 2: where you are as part of that. And if you
Speaker 2: rely upon trees to create the curtain, you know, you
Speaker 2: might as well be in a in a darkened room
Speaker 2: for all that matters. You lose the sense of place
Speaker 2: and of what's special about the golf course.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what you're talking about right now, the term
Speaker 1: of art for it is view shed, which is and
Speaker 1: that is the idea that you can you can see
Speaker 1: across a landscape or have a long view from from
Speaker 1: multiple different vantage points, and that is that is beautiful.
Speaker 1: That's the thing is that there's there are different kinds
Speaker 1: of beauty. The beauty of an individual tree is undeniable.
Speaker 1: But but but certainly when you're on a golf course,
Speaker 1: the ability to see, to have that view shed is
Speaker 1: a power esthetic experience. And I think that's that's probably
Speaker 1: the factor that makes a lot of club members who
Speaker 1: might initially oppose a tree program eventually endorse it once
Speaker 1: they discover the wonders of the view shed. Then then
Speaker 1: it's all over. Then they're suggesting more trees that can
Speaker 1: be taken out because they have that kind of emotional
Speaker 1: experience of being able to see across.
Speaker 2: The views you have, they're either exterior or interior. They're
Speaker 2: either you know, whistling straight or looking at the lake
Speaker 2: or at aronomank. You're looking across the beauty of that
Speaker 2: slope and the holds behind it, so that you have
Speaker 2: to sort of decide what it is you're revealing. But
Speaker 2: it can be one or two or both that's available
Speaker 2: to you.
Speaker 1: Sorry, No, that's the great point. I was going to
Speaker 1: add that there's a there's an interesting issue also of
Speaker 1: scale here where, And I just saw an example this
Speaker 1: this morning. We're recording this the week of the US Open,
Speaker 1: and this morning Might Clay and the great Australian player
Speaker 1: and architect, just posted a before and after photo of
Speaker 1: the thirteenth hole at the Addington in England. And there's
Speaker 1: you know, the before photo has the tree very closely
Speaker 1: enclosed by has the hole very closely enclosed by trees.
Speaker 1: And then the second photos not every tree has been removed,
Speaker 1: but it has been opened up. And to me, in
Speaker 1: the second photo, the land looks way bigger. It looks
Speaker 1: bigger in scale, and part of the reason for that
Speaker 1: is that the trees are no longer overwhelming the scale
Speaker 1: of the land. The land as all of a sudden
Speaker 1: the bigger thing, or is at least competing with the
Speaker 1: scale of the trees, and so all of a sudden
Speaker 1: the golf hole doesn't look dinky anymore. It looks more
Speaker 1: grand by a lot. And that's another effect of tree
Speaker 1: removal that has that I think is it's something it's
Speaker 1: hard to understand unless you have actual on the ground
Speaker 1: experience of that before and after.
Speaker 2: Yep, yeah, yeah. I always I have this secret theory
Speaker 2: that at country clubs people started, they didn't really want
Speaker 2: to see their business partners, they didn't want to see
Speaker 2: who else was sleeping with the you know, their spouses.
Speaker 2: They wanted to just have this little isolated thing because
Speaker 2: they really were kind of grumpy about stuff, and they
Speaker 2: got so used to this narrow view that they forgot
Speaker 2: where they were. And it's it's just now we're allowing
Speaker 2: them in this grander view. I think of Inwood Country
Speaker 2: Club on Long Island. There's just a fantastic example. When
Speaker 2: I grew up there caddying, it was tree lined and
Speaker 2: you had no idea of downtown Manhattan, you had no
Speaker 2: idea of the marshland, you had no idea of the
Speaker 2: transition of the terrain through those landforms. And now it's
Speaker 2: the vital part of the golf course experience. It's just
Speaker 2: completely changes your sense of what you're doing while you're
Speaker 2: playing golf.
Speaker 1: So looking towards the few sure here, do you think
Speaker 1: I think there's a sense out there that that that
Speaker 1: tree management has won and that maybe even we've gone
Speaker 1: a little bit too far. And that in some courses
Speaker 1: we've removed too many trees. Where where do you come
Speaker 1: down on that? Do you think there is still a
Speaker 1: significant amount of work to be done, both both culturally
Speaker 1: and practically at golf courses toward the goal of tree management,
Speaker 1: or do you think that that there's a moment here
Speaker 1: when we can start to step back and say, how
Speaker 1: can we restore some trees to some of these landscapes
Speaker 1: that that might be calling out for them. Where do
Speaker 1: you land on that or is it just a club
Speaker 1: by club thing?
Speaker 2: Well? I am sensitive to the view. I know a
Speaker 2: number of architects have sort of tried to sit this
Speaker 2: one out and think, well, this is just a fad.
Speaker 2: This is like you know, island greens, or railroad ties
Speaker 2: or or drivable four parts. And I don't think it's
Speaker 2: that way, because I think the agronomic benefits, the management benefits,
Speaker 2: and the esthetic beauty that results is so transformative and
Speaker 2: so unique to the nature of the golf as a
Speaker 2: sports field that I think we're more or less this
Speaker 2: is where we are going to be, and then it's
Speaker 2: a matter of refining that. I do think that a
Speaker 2: lot of attention needs to be paid to how the
Speaker 2: site evolved on a case by case basis. I do
Speaker 2: think that's important. And again I go back to what
Speaker 2: Gill says. I was there when he was making a
Speaker 2: pitch to do the restoration of Worcester Country Club, where
Speaker 2: I just was. Last week they had the centenary of
Speaker 2: the twenty five US Open and this is back a
Speaker 2: few years ago, and they said are They asked Gill,
Speaker 2: of all people, are you an expert in what Donald
Speaker 2: Ross did? He says, I'm going to be an expert
Speaker 2: in what Donald Ross did to Worcester Country Club. And
Speaker 2: it was the perfect answer. And so that's what architects
Speaker 2: need to do. That's why I resist the notion of
Speaker 2: a certain expertise that you're so used to what so
Speaker 2: and so did that you know what he did. Everywhere
Speaker 2: That formula didn't play very well. I think the architects
Speaker 2: now who have come up either through the ranks or
Speaker 2: who have matured from the big companies and gone off
Speaker 2: on their own, I think a lot of them are
Speaker 2: much more attentive to the specifics of that site, that history,
Speaker 2: that evolution, and on a case by case basis. Having
Speaker 2: said that, I do see there's a need for tree
Speaker 2: replacement of existing trees. There's a need for tree planning
Speaker 2: and tree management really is a sustained commitment, not just
Speaker 2: about removal. It's not just a euphemism for removal. It
Speaker 2: requires a really comprehensive plan, you know, attention to the
Speaker 2: health and safety of the mature trees, including the elm
Speaker 2: trees that are still there. So I do think it
Speaker 2: requires a little bit more, a lot more than the
Speaker 2: notion of tree removal. It's planning what the landscape is
Speaker 2: going to look like. You know. Frederick Lahlmsted this when
Speaker 2: he built Central Park, and all of his planning was
Speaker 2: about anticipating thirty forty years of how that site would evolve,
Speaker 2: not just what it's going to be today. So that
Speaker 2: requires considerable technical training and planning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Brad, thank you for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 1: Always want to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Pleasure.
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