Tom MacWood:

I thought you considered yourself to be a good researcher. How could you not have known that Pinehurst's land plan wasn't done before FLO retired from the business? That you don't know that is just positively SHOCKING!!!!!!!

That kind of gap in knowledge should serve to kill even the little bit of remaining credibility you have on here.

What do you think Bradley S.? Don't you think that just proves this guy is a bunch of hot air?

TE
Wow, thats a pretty strong reaction, especially from someone who just a few posts before said Olmsted died in 1895. The plan was unveiled in 1895, why are you certain FL Olmsted was not involved?

Gib

Read it again.  It is a well written and well argued description of many of th echanges that are hapening in our world.  The only thing that surprises me is that it was written by an Aussie!

Rich

PS--

Q.  How and why did this thread turn so quickly into a trivia/pissing contest about Olmstead?
A.  Read the article yet again.......

R

"TE
Wow, thats a pretty strong reaction, especially from someone who just a few posts before said Olmsted died in 1895. The plan was unveiled in 1895, why are you certain FL Olmsted was not involved?"

Tom MacWood:

Have you read posts #s 14,17 and 18 or a Olmsted biography? Apparently not?  

Tom McWood,

with all due respect to TEP, he's not the one to ask (reply #27) here why he's sure Olmsted wasn't involved in Pinehurst. He's obviously following me on this, and his assumption is perfectly reasonable based upon the evidence.

My initial point (in reply #14, based upon my Ross book) was that Olmsted never visited Pinehurst and that it really wasn't "his" plan. Given the evidence, and the lack of any proof of his involvement, and the reasonableness of concluding that he was in no condition to help and never saw Pinehurst, it makes sense to say that it wasn't his plan.

I spent a lot of time researching that Ross biography, much of it in the Tufts Archives, where the extensive file on Olmsted and Pinehurst is very clear. James Tufts went to the offices of Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot to talk about Pinehurst on June 20, 1895, met with the elder Olmsted and others. They agreed then to a contract of $300. Olmsted Sr. had already been showing signs of dementia - evident by the conflict inside the firm over his work in March and April at Biltmore. He had headed north to the office in early June from Biltmore Forest and clearly did no field work or drafting after that on any major projects, only brief ceremonial work and a few official matters, and he was clearly out of it and unable to focus on any planning.

The work on Pinehurst was immediately handed over to the firm's horticulture expert and director of planning, Warren Manning, who worked with local surveyor Frank Deaton. Olmsted never visited Pinehurst; he was languishing in dementia, taking rest vacations. Manning and Deaton did the site work, and they delivered the basic drawings to Tufts on Nov. 17, 1895, by which time Olmsted, on forced retirement from his own firm (at $1,200 a year), had set sail for a vacation in Britain.

Manning went on to make Pinehurst a significant part of his own independent professional commitment for decades.

By the way, the definitive FLO biography, by Laura Wood Roper, has extensive material on all of Olmsted's project and never mentions the word "Pinehurst" in the text or the index.

The book (biography) I use on Olmsted is called "Frederick Law Olmsted, Designing the American Landscape" by Charles Beveridge and Paul Rochelau (kindly given to me by one Yancy Beamer). It precisely confirms the details of the end of FLO's career Brad Klein just outlined, but something tells me Tom MacWood will just keep asking and questioning. Perhaps he has found something from a 1903 edition of the Columbus Times Picayune that details FLO's total dedication to Pinehurst until the day he dropped dead in 1903.  

Tom MacWood may even have some ultra-special source into the life of FLO that no one else is aware of as he has claimed that FLO kept John Rushkin's book by his bedside. That's some pretty important information from a guy who doesn't even know when or under what circumstances FLO's active career wound to a halt.

Thanks, Brian and Sean

Brian, your description of Stonehaven is a virtual mirror of Aberdour!  Same age, same course size, great (but different) views.  Even the same annual dues!  Like you, we are full of an increasing and increasingly healthy and wealthy group of seniors who want their 1/2 price dues without any reduction in privileges.  They also would prefer an old style club, where members speak in hushed tones and women and children are seen but not heard.  We do still have a waiting list, but that is rare for our area.

As you note, the crux of the problem is the declining number and quality of pople in the 17-50 year bracket.  I see the reason for this problem slightly differently.

Primarily, this group has far more alternative ways to spend their time and money than previous generations.  Tennis, the gym, foreign holidays, children's sports and other activities, etc..  Golf is competing with these alternatives for the attention of this group, and in many ways is found lacking (too time consuming, too expensive, too hard, too fuddy-duddy, etc.).  Even Tom Paul gets it a bit right this time (when not bickering about Olmstead)--if you want to attract younger people, build a spa rather than buy new china for the dining room.

Secondly, the new members which do come in are often new to the area, or even to the game of golf.  This is partly due to increased mobility but also to the fact that the children of the senior members can't afford to live and stay in the area where they grew up once they start families.  Our best young players will hang in to their early-mid twenties, but after that they tend to drift away.

What you end up with is a multi-furcated membership--a dwindling number of keen and good youngish golfers, a growing number of youngish learners and/or "social" golfers, an ever growing phalanx of seniors, some keen, some just grumpy old men (and women).  There is no binding social fabric, such as one ought to have in a "club."  Everybody is in it for themselves (or their mini-cohort), and not the greater good.  We shouldn't be surprised, however, as that is exactly what is happening to "society"--both in the UK and the US.

My other club, Dornoch, is different in that it is wealthy and has hugely more prospective members than it needs.  It is similar, however, in that the membership is aging (largely due to retirees emigrating from England, the US, etc. to enjoy the cheap and great golf).  As there is an increasing amount of emigres, the local nature of the club, rooted in history and gene pools, is diminishing.  The club used to be loosely bound together by a relatively large group of members (most in the 17-50 are bracket) who lived elsewhere but spent 2-4 weeks in town every summer.  They shared the tee times and the competitions with the locals, but left the locals to run the club and preserve it's traditions.  Not for nothing did they hold the EGM setting dues and deciding key policies in February.....

Sean

You are very lucky to have a club whose social activity has increased.  How the hell did you do it?  At both of my clubs (outwith a few exceptional but predictable days) the atmosphere gets more and more alien and morguelike every year.

Rich

Sean
Yes , our club is going to introduce a mandatory £60 bar voucher scheme next year . Talk of more Golfers quitting because of it .

I know its not very pc to say it , but our clubhouse atmosphere has steadly declined , along with enforcement of drink-driving laws .

Best Regards
Brian

Rich is right, there are too many alternative uses for our time and society is changing faster today than at any time in the last 180 years. Is it any wonder a relatively new development, whose model only existed for a couple of generations, is now going to have to change.

I have seen moribund industries revitalise themselves by changing the service provided and putting their prices up, so they become vital again on a smaller customer base.   GOLF IN GB IS TOO F****** CHEAP! Both the above examples are of clubs that I would love to belong to and £360 wouldn’t buy me a third of a season ticket to sit on my arse watching Soccer or Rugby!  Before Sky came along everyone used to moan about the BBC fee being too high at £50 or whatever.  Now Sky has found enough customers who hand over (I believe) anything from £480 quid a year to sit on your arse and fall asleep!  

(This is also cost based. Compare the increases in what a plumber costs compared to what a gardener gets over the last 10 years.  In North Berwick this summer the guy on the counter of the CO-OP store,  left a greenkeepers position of 10 years at Gullane for more money.  Golf is too cheap to survie in todays econmy – get used to it).

Most Parent s of the golden age of Golf Club Culture spent less time with their kids (my supposition I admit) than the family man of today.  At the same time we have more family’s than ever breaking up.  How does this situation affect the club culture?   Other social changes in GB include the war on drinking and driving. Over here in the last 20 years the country pub has changed from where you went to get smashed and have a quiet drive home to a place providing meal’s for couples and families.  Golf clubs have not found a similar way to adapt.


And the implications for GCA as an industry starting to meltdown look at the trends

1.The course itself doesn't suit the modern golfer . Everyone wants to play what they see on television and are much more willing to travel for it . A quirky , unfair , 118 year old , 63 acre , par66 with great views just doesn't attract nowadays .

3. Society golf .
And I am as guilty as everyone else . Start of the season I will buy a bunch of those 2fore1 vouchers and we travel around the country looking for value for money , and ticking off lists .

I see golf entering a period of severe mutation and those stuck with what they like now may not be able to find much of it in the future. As I write I’m 48 and have been a member of a club for less than a year. The danger of those retired members wanting cheap and conservative golf makes them the enemy within. Adapt or die is the message here, and a club in the grip of it’s older members isn’t about to change.

Tom, I can't prove that something did not happen, but I don't think FLO himself was involved. The details are pretty basic, as outlined in my book. James Tufts visits FLO and OO&E on June 20, 1895; the firm does some plans based upon local surveys and delivers the first drawings July 6, then has to redo them completely because the surveys were wrong and sends its own people down there to work, led by Warren Manning. FLO never set foot in Pinehurst. He was incapable of functioning at the time in anything more than a ceremonial manner. The final plans evolve, are delivered on Nov. 17, by which time FLO is on forced retirement at $1,200 a year and off for six weeks R&R in GB.

I know there are golf course architects in the U.S. who get paid for their "signature designs" on that basis, but even they end up showing up once --- and even if they did, I would not claim it was really their design. In this case with Pinehurst, not even that standard was met. So I conclude FLO was not involved in the planning. You can put it any (other) way you want, but any other conclusion you draw is simply based upon speculation and hope, not evidence.

I think what you say about Manning is very interesting. I also think what you call "wild gardens" would have been what the British theorists and writers called "picturesque." I know lots of GCA junkies think links golf is the important lineage to trace when it comes to modern golf course design, but based upon a recent trip to GB where we saw dozens of historic gardens and I dabbled in some (admittedly) diverse readings, I'm increasingly convinced that the vital connector was landscape theory and garden design, particularly (are you sitting down?) the Arts & Crafts theorists and subsequent generations of garden writers they influenced: Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Christopher Lloyd. I think this is the vital link that is needed to establish an influence of Arts and Crafts on golf course design.

By the way, Lloyd's father, who created the wonderful wild garden at Great Dixter, was an avid golfer and member of Rye GC. I can only imagine his conversations with fellow member Bernard Darwin.    

But we digress. Western civilization is collapsing, as are its golf clubs.

I think the argument could be made that just because private club member numbers are down, that does not necessarily mean that "Club Culture' is down. At least not at top clubs?

"I also think what you call "wild gardens" would have been what the British theorists and writers called "picturesque."

Bradley S.:

The concepts of "the Sublime". "the Beautiful" and "the Picturesque" are interesting in how they evolved through art, science and philosophy to be categorized and analyzed, particularly be the Royal Society (incorporated in 1662 by the Crown). In that climate of experiment, categorization and description whole areas of thought and experience were subjected to analysis and exegesis. The subject of aesthetics was no excpetion. By the 18th century Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant et al were defining and distinguishing the terms "Sublime" and "Beautiful" to natural occurrence or the human experience of it. In 1757 Kant published his "Philsosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

"The Beautiful" as exemplified in the paintings of Claude Lorrain et al (Salvator Rosa)---eg careful asymmentries of balanced groups of trees used as repoussoirs in the foreground to flank a distance in which the light is reflected from the surface of lake, sea or river, became the device for presenting landscape within the confines of a rectangular frame so well known and resorted to that it came to seem as natural as nature itself. (perhaps this is where my semi-aversion came from to landscape architecture>golf course architecture's principle of "Emphasis"----eg directing the eye to the most important part if that is where one is SUPPOSED to hit the ball ).

The paintings of Lorrain, for example, exemplifying "the Beautiful" became the model for a new breed of landscape gardeners who emerged during the 18th century. Lancelot "Capability" Brown, the most well known of those in 18th century England, was employed by landowners all over England to transform their "parks" (estates) into view that Lorrain might have painted.

This new art-form (landscape gardening) bred its own theorists which led to the enunciation of various "rules" by which nature could be "improved".

A Rev. William Gilpin (18th century) articulated a complete theory of aesthetics on the principle of "the Picturesque" which was essentially a specialized branch of "the Beautiful".

From this came the first applications of landscape gardening or English landscape architecture principles that were applied to golf course architecture app 150 plus years later. An architect such as Macdonald even mentioned the names of a few of those early landcape gardeners or landscape architects as analogous to golf course architecture and golf architects.

By the way, an English landscape designer such as Lancelot Brown who utilized landscape design theories of "the Picturesque" that were later applied to golf course architecture preceded the Arts and Crafts Movement by app a century.



 

"They also thought the English landscape school was a sham. In spite of what it professed to be, it was governed by as many rules and was as formal as anything that had gone before.
They preferred the real McCoy to this idealized form of nature, which in their opinion was not natural."

Tom MacWood:

That very well may be and that's all very interesting, in the area of and in the evolution of landscape design, but we are talking about golf course architecture here and the influence of landscape architectural principles (art principles) on it.

It occurs to me that there have always been a number of "rules" and "art" (landscape architecture) principles (Balance, Harmony, Proportion, Rhythm and Emphasis) as well from landscape architecture that have been massively applied to golf course architecture including the general theory of "improving" upon nature (idealizing). Obviously, some of that has to do with the fact that golf itself NECESSARILY requires a number of aspects that are inherently NOT natural--eg tees, fairways, putting greens or even sand bunkering on sites where sand is anything but natural.

I'm not saying we have to like it (and in many ways I don't) but it's almost impossible to deny the reality of it and its massive influence on golf course architecture in the last century. Your inclination to assume that the Arts and Crafts Movement, perhaps inspired by or inspiring of some form of it like the English "wild garden" form of a Gertrude Jekyll, is a wish, not a reality.  

But who knows, perhaps it's in our future for golf course architecture, now that we are in the midst of a mini-cycle in golf course architecture that could fairly be considered golf architecture's first "renaissance" in its history.

By the way, Tom, have you ever stayed at Greywalls in Gullane and have you studied Gertrude Jekyll's garden there attached to Edwin Luytens design?