St Andrews Old Course Renovations, Phase 2 (Photos)

[Jon Wiggett]

St. Andrews has several turf nurseries. I suspect they are cutting slabs so the can cut a good thickness and get the areas back in play quickly.

Jon

[Bradley Anderson]

St. Andrews has several turf nurseries. I suspect they are cutting slabs so the can cut a good thickness and get the areas back in play quickly.

Jon

Jon,

I am curious about the grass species and how it roots. Maybe you could answer some questions: Is St. Andrews a mixture of bentgrass, poa annua and fescue? And if there is a mixture of grasses in the sod would the fescue get crowed out by the other species after if has been cut into turves and relaid? My experience with fescue sod is it takes a lot longer to root than bentgrass and poa annua sod and so I am curious if a process like the one we see in the photos would yield a transformation in the percentages of grasses.

[Jeff_Mingay]

I wonder whether Dawson and Hawtree actually believe that putting a few artificial undulations to the right of a green is going to make the hole play one iota harder for professionals? I forgot that Hawtree doesn't play, so creating undulations like these must be rather an abstract exercise for him.

Golf Club Atlas should have a "Like" button option, 'cause I like this post.

[Jon Wiggett]

Bradley,

as far as I am aware TOC is a mix of Festuca Rubra...., Agrostis tenuis and Poa a.. The tendeny is to encourage fescue. As long as you take a sufficient depth then the festuca will be fine and recover as quickly as any other type of grass species. The problem that many in the US have in my experience is overfeeding the sward from a fescue point of view and so allowing other grass types to out perform them.

If you do this type of work at this time of year in the north of the UK then you have very slow leaf growth from all grass types, shallow rooting from most grass types but fescue will have a bit more vigour then most. Big thing in my experience is to insure a good contact between the sod and the ground.

That your bent and poa rooted quicker than the fescue suggests to me that either the sod was thinly cut or your bent was palustris not tenuis.

Having said all that I would expect the sward to stay pretty similar if the same sod is replaced. In this case the crowns will gain more fescue and hollow more bent and poa would be my guess.

Jon

[Neil_Crafter]

I wonder whether Dawson and Hawtree actually believe that putting a few artificial undulations to the right of a green is going to make the hole play one iota harder for professionals? I forgot that Hawtree doesn't play, so creating undulations like these must be rather an abstract exercise for him.

Golf Club Atlas should have a "Like" button option, 'cause I like this post.

Thanks Jeff, I will take your "like" which ever way it comes! But yes a like button would be handy if you agree but don't want to make a post yourself.

[Bradley Anderson]

Jon,

The rejuvenation of roots in sod develop from the crown of the plant. The original roots inside of the soil layer do not develop much in the way of new roots from the point where they were severed.

In my experience fescue just roots slower than any other type of grass regardless of sod depth. I have cut it at 1 inch and at 2.5 inch depths. The 1 inch rooted much faster than the 2.5 inch because the crown didn't have as far to push new roots before it reached the soil.

Even when I have seeded fescue it has taken two years before the root systems are deep enough to thrive without supplemental irrigation through our hot midwestern summers.

I would not expect the fescue in Scotland to behave exactly like what I have experienced here and from what you have experienced it sounds like all of the movement of the sod at The Old Course will not have the effect of changing the delicate balance and percentages of grass species. These are some of the oldest sports turf swards in the world and it would be disappointing to learn that even the turf species have been compromised along with the architecture of The Old Course.