Mike -
I agree. There is far too little appreciation that regional soil/fauna/weather differences ought to dictate different architecural "looks."
It is to the eternal credit of MacKenzie that he didn't try to build a Cypress Point in clay hills of Augusta, Georgia.
But developers - the guys with the money - don't often understand that. I'm not sure many architects do either. (Exibit A-1, Pete Dye's designs in wind-swept Florida.) They want the flashy stuff.
All this came home to me yesterday as I stood in a dove field in northern Mississippi. Beautifully rolling land with native scrub on the borders. The scrub, maybe 5 or 6 different plant varieties, looks remarkably like whins and gorse in Scotland when you let it grow out. Set farther back were large native oaks and sycamores.
Gorgeous. It struck me that I was huning at the edge of a beautiful, native fairway. All that was missing was a tee and a green.
But it also struck me that I never saw these native weeds on courses in the SE. They would be beautiful, they would be cheap to maintain, they would serve useful strategic purposes in penalizing foozles, hiding greens and controlling erosion. Just like the native weeds in Scotland do.
But I've never seen them used in courses in the SE. Never. And I don't know why not, unless it's precisely because they ARE native and, thus, disdained by developers and architects.
They are making a mistake. Courses in the SE (or any region, for that matter) ought to look like they belong in the region in which they were built. It's not hard to do. And I'm convinced that after a brief adjustment period, people would love them.
Bob