"If you want to elaborate...elaborate. Since when do you need me or someone else to request for your elaboration? Make your point clearly and then back it up with factual information."
Tom MacWood:
I will eloborate but first I feel this entire subject needs to be taken all the way back to the way things were starting with Capability Brown's career, what came before him in his chosen field, how that eventually may've effected golf and golf architecture right into the 20th century. And in that process go forward to golf's initial migration out of the linksland to inland sites in GB and then America and beyond in time and place.
We need to look at things like why some of the early rudimentary (geometric or Victorian or Steeplechase) golf features really did initially appear in even some of those massive landscape designed "parks" that were essentially Capability Brown's career inventory.
We then need to look again at what happened to change those types of early rudimentary golf architecture features and what inspired them to become more natural appearing. Was that primarily the result of the A/C movement or someone who was a proponent of it like a Gertrude Jekyll and her style of "wild garden"---eg basically "cottage garden" landscape gardening design on a notably small scale compared to the massive "serpentined" pastoral "park" look of the style and type of a Capability Brown or a Repton who followed him? Or was it primarily the result of the first happenstance of inland golf design in the Heathlands like Sunningdale and Huntercombe which were the first examples "inland" where the necessary TIME and MONEY were devoted to the DETAILS of a golf architectural project inland combined with the fact that those projects happened to be the first time inland golf architecture (outside Scotland) looked back to the Scottish linksland's "pre-architecture" natural model?
Interestingly, the combined literature of the history and evolution of golf course architecture assigns it to the latter. Why do you suppose that is? Do you really think it was because the combined literature of golf architecture's evolution and history was heretofore only given some cursory glance?
Today I had a most interesting conversation with someone who could probably carry on this discussion best particularly as he familiarizes himself a bit better with the details of all its component parts. For his own reasons he may not want to get too involved in this discussion but I hope he does, at least in a general sense.
What I believe you have done, and continue to do, is to take a concurrent and somewhat parallel discipline and attempt to apply it to golf course architecture's evolution in a far to direct way.
If we start out again in a general historic sense and then work towards some of the details of golf architecture and its features and designs I think we will then see that your assumptions and conclusions just don't connect very well to golf architecture's evolution. Or if they do connect they only connect in such a general sense as to not be particularly important to the understanding of golf architecture's evolution and history to date. We then should see what the real reasons for its evolution were. In other words, what the real and important influences on it were.
Unfortunately for us, or for you, we may see that this story has already been pretty well told.
What may never have been told particularly well, though, is the details of not just how but also why various landscape design applications have been attached to golf architecture over its history.
And for that I think we need to go all the way back to the 18th century and to Capability Brown, what he did and how that began to apply to at least one pretty significant style involving golf course architecture.