I think we tend to use as a measuring stick for naturalness too narrow a point of view, in this sense: since none of us are magic, we can't just appear on the first tee, we have to get there, get to the golf course - and usually we get there by driving for many miles. Well, on that drive, we pass landscapes and landforms and natural features and vegetation etc. And if, when we get to the course, we sense or see or feel that it is cut from the same cloth and expresses the same kinds of landscapes and landforms and natural features and vegetation as that which we have experienced for the last 30 miles, I think we're much more likely to feel/experience the golf course as somehow pleasingly natural, regardless of how much subtle manipulation a good architect has employed to make the site fit for golf.
Peter
Dear Peter
I must respectfully but completely disagree.
To me a huge part of the magic that is golf is that when you get through the gates of a golf club, whether it be a great or a modest one, what you see is something completely different from what you have seen on the journey to get there. There is absolutely no intimation of what you are going to see when you finally arrive at Pebble Beach, even when you are well on your way along the 17-Mile Drive, or even in the parking lot behind the pro shop. Driving to Dornoch, nothing at all intimates great golf until you drive through the town, take the sharp left up on Golf Road, and then begin to see the course unfold as you stop between the clubhouse and the first tee. Same thing with Prestwick, and Merion, and Royal Melbourne and Candlewood in Ipswich, MA (the latter being the first golf golf on which I ever played).
Golf courses are oases for the soul, and like the oases of the deserts of the world, thrill us in large part becasue they represent the triumph of mankind over all the other forces of "nature." At least IMHO....
....Rich