Mark Rowlinson's Aerials - General Observations

[Duncan Cheslett]

I'm sure it's all about aesthetics.

People like to see trees - they are eye candy. An open aspect, whether links, heathland. or parkland, can look a little barren and featureless to the eye of the non golf-purist. Trees were a cheap and easy way to 'beautify' golf courses and fell in with a theme generally fashionable throughout society at the time that more trees were a good thing. British members may remember the officially sanctioned campaign to "Plant a tree in '73"

While we GCAers have concerns about trees interfering with play, trees around the perimeters of courses remain very popular. Beau Desert for example, has a wonderful feeling of seclusion from the real world, being surrounded by dense forest. Photographs from 100 years ago however, reveal that the aspect from the course was completely open, with views of collieries and industial blight. Little wonder that trees were allowed to grow. Reddish Vale offers another example;

14th tee in 1985ish



14th tee in 2011




99.9% of golfers would prefer to see trees than an industrial town. Since the latter photo, the trees actually interfering with the tee-shot have been removed, but those enclosing the course remain.

Chatting to our head green keeper recently, he said that only five trees had ever been deliberately planted on our course. The rest, mainly silver birches and some small oaks, had self-seeded and not been removed in a change of policy dating back to the sixties or seventies. Prior to that, saplings would have been removed as soon as they broke ground - a policy now returned to.

We perhaps need to remember that nature's default position is to cover most landscapes with trees, where conditions allow. Open spaces require the hand of man (or grazing animals) to keep trees in check. In many cases it was the relaxing of this tree management programme that allowed trees to become omnipresent on golf courses, rather than specific planting.

[BCrosby]

Golf committee chairs looking for memorials?

Clubs looking to separate corridors for safety?

Bill -

For sure those are some of the reasons for the forestation of golf courses post WWII. But they don't explain its timing. Egoistic Green Chairs and safety concerns have been a part of golf from way back.

Bob 

[Tony_Muldoon]

Bob you are right to look at reasons for the timing, 50’s onwards.


Like Duncan I wondered if it was part of the Augusta effect but the BBC only started its broadcasts in the 80’s.  Likewise any earlier transmissions would have been in B&W on frequently  treeless courses e.g. The Open.
It’s possible more people travelled in the post war era and wanted to make their course look like “X”.  But I have magazines form the 60’s and 70’s and it’s amazing how only the cover was in colour and that most often featured a player. The course pictures inside were mostly B&W.

I tend to think that coming out of the war years Clubs started to attract a new membership. Funds and the appetite for large scale renovations/restoration weren’t available but some annual tree planting was and it just got out of hand.

I’m in a related industry and I will  research to see if anything changed re tree production in the 50’s. Trees were much cheaper then, even more so than they are now. Today most trees are container grown which guarantees a higher survival rate and allows a much longer planting season. Then trees and whips were sold ‘bare root’ which is much cheaper to produce and to transport and makes them ideal for winter planting. If, as is anecdotally said here, courses were mainly played in the summer, then the labour for this work would have been seen as ‘free’.  No one realised what the future maintenance costs would be.

[BCrosby]

Tony writes:

"I tend to think that coming out of the war years Clubs started to attract a new membership. Funds and the appetite for large scale renovations/restoration weren’t available but some annual tree planting was and it just got out of hand."

I think that is a good start at an answer. After WWII the club I grew up on became more of a family club. In the 50's a pool was built, dining became more important, there were more mixed social events. With that change in the club's ethos came a preference for a "prettier", better appointed clubhouse - one less oriented around men simply playing golf, gambling and drinking.

(My sense is that the club's core golfers at the time didn't give a damn about clubhouse and other 'improvements'. Many thought it was a waste of money. I base that on a history I wrote of my club and intereviews I did with some of the survivors from that era. Of course, I might not have interviewed a representative sample, just the crotchety bastards too tough to die young. )

To get back on track, it would follow that the domestication of the club would extend to its golf course. Put differently, the golf course was at some point seen less as a playing field for golf matches and more as an green space that could be made more attactive with better landscaping. Or something like that.

I don't know if any of that applied to clubs in the UK post WWII. Nor am I sure how universal it was in the US.

Bob