Robert Trent Jones Jr believes tree elimination is overdone in golf course structure.
Jones feels the elimination of bushes has its place in golf however ought to primarily be utilised on hyperlinks programs.
He feels that tree elimination can be utilized as a simple strategy to remedy sure points.
“On the subject of clear-cutting bushes for views, it may be overdone. Superintendents have rightly been involved about an excessive amount of shade on the grass that they’re attempting to take care of, and so they additionally don’t like roots that stick up and compete for water,” Jones advised Golf Digest.
“These are professional factors, and so they’ve gained a louder voice with the greens committees overseeing renovations. My concern is that too typically the tree elimination appears to be all or nothing. It’s sort of like our politics.
“It’s higher if it’s carried out on a case-by-case foundation, but it surely’s at the moment in style. What normally occurs in style is that the pendulum is at all times swinging, and it might probably swing too far. I imagine within the “golden imply” of the Greeks, to discover a comfortable medium.
“It shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all method to the presence of bushes on golf programs. We stay in a giant nation with numerous totally different environments—we’re not all one factor, so these dialogues needs to be going down independently.
“If the course is within the Northeast or the South, or in components of California the place I stay, it’s possible that bushes are going to be native to the atmosphere in some type and regularly regenerating—that’s what nature does. On a hyperlinks course there shouldn’t be any bushes as a result of they’re usually not indigenous to these kinds of coastal and estuary environments. They will block the wind and negate the necessity to play the ball alongside the bottom, which might reduce the curiosity of these programs.
“We constructed Chambers Bay on an outdated mining web site however constructed it to look and play like an Irish hyperlinks, and there’s only one single tree on the course.
“Most programs would do effectively to look whether or not the bushes are indigenous and a part of the ecological place the place they’re positioned.
“When golf-course communities have been being developed, primarily within the Solar Belt, the programs served because the central parks of this suburbanization, the group inexperienced areas. Bushes had a constructive affect in an environmental and societal sense, even for non-golfers.
“Now, a few of the bushes that have been planted on programs over time shouldn’t have been as a result of they weren’t the correct of bushes. The tree planting that was carried out at, let’s say, Oakmont within the 1960—which my father participated in mildly—had the impact of taking away a few of the harshness and battle of these large greens and contours and even the bunkers. The elimination of all these bushes previously 30 years returned it to what (founder H.C.) Fownes needed.
“However bushes will be helpful shields. You wish to ask, ‘What do you see whenever you take away the bushes?’ If it’s a rubbish dump that’s in all probability a mistake. Conversely, if it’s a gorgeous mountain within the distance, that could be an excellent factor.
“A lot of these bushes at Oakmont have been planted to protect the course when the Pennsylvania Turnpike was constructed, and eradicating the bushes from that space of the course means you’re way more conscious of the visitors noise beneath and even the exhaust from the automobiles.
“For an architect, bushes can operate like an instrument. They’re vertical hazards together with our different parts of protection: size, width, bunkers, ponds or creeks, the inviable hazard of the wind, the targets of the greens and the contours of these inside. You’re employed with these like a composer does music to create 18 totally different holes whereas attempting to not repeat your self.
“I don’t imagine golf programs needs to be made to be exhausting or simple—they need to be made to make stunning music that you just wish to come again to, and eradicating any of these parts, together with bushes, limits the vary of music you can also make.”
