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Egan? Could you give us one "naturalistic" course Egan designed other than his design work at PBGL (in collaboration with MacKenzie and Hunter)?"
Tom MacWood:
Yes Egan. I don't care if Pebble was the only thing he did. The strength of his imitation sand dunes as naturalism are good enough for me.
"Were any of the gentlemen you list influenced by FL Olmsted?"
I have no idea. Perhaps they were, particularly as there appears to me to be a strong correlation in something they all were trying to accomplish artistically.
"What about Billy Bell, Stanley Thompson, CB Macdonald, William Flynn, Walter Travis, Tom Simpson, and Donald Ross?"
Perhaps I should include Bell but I don't know that much about him. I think I should've included Thompson from the photos I've seen of his work. I wouldn't include Macdonald except perhaps from the little I've seen of The Lido. William Flynn---maybe, he'd be close. Travis, probably not, don't know enough about Tom Simpson to know and Donald Ross, I'd say no. I shoud've included George Thomas in my list though.
"Its not important if the garden courses are interesting novelty or not."
Maybe not, but one does need to look at the impact of an art form. Miniature golf architecture inside English gardens probably didn't have that much impact on the naturalist golf architects I'm speaking of but perhaps I'm wrong about that. Perhaps the miniature golf course inside English gardens was the single biggest motivator of their hopes and dreams for the future of truly naturalistc golf architecture on a bigger scale!
"You said: Scale has nothing to do with this. Scale is just an architectural technique whether it be building, garden or golf course design. But if a golf architect is to minimize the impact and observability of his "parts" (his man-made features) to meld them better into the whole (natural scene as far as the eye can see) he pretty much has to do it by matching Nature's own scale of her commensurate "parts" with his own."
"They are both minature...Tom Simpson's design at Windlesham Moor, the private estate of William Clark in Surrey. IMO the photograph also illustrates the naturalistic form of the English garden of that period...the golf course appears to be in its natural environment, if you didn't know better, you would never geuss its within a garden."
That's interesting. No, from that photo on top above I probably wouldn't have guessed that was a miniature course inside an English garden. I may not have guessed the bottom one was a miniature either except for the fact the two players on the green look to be about 20 feet tall!!
Did nature create anything in those miniature courses or was it all man created?
I subscribe to Behr's remark that the medium of the golf architect is the surface of the earth. Obviously, when he mentioned that in one of his articles he was referring to the 'forces of Nature' but the scale of a particular natural site could've been just as usefully used, in my opinion.