Golf


there is an increasing interest in having firm, ‘fescue/bent’ greens once again. This contrasts to the 1980/90s when the fashionable concept was to have a ‘lush, all-one-colour green’ and, since the millennium, even the USGA’s recent president has now said “brown is great” Next year, the US Open will be played on a running course at Chambers Bay in cool season Washington State where the grass is predominantly red fescue. The R&A’s Open Championship and


Bent grass and Annual Meadow-grass


overseas golfer wanting to play classic Scottish links golf and not the target-golf of which they had plenty back home. Parsinen’s revolution at Kingsbarns used modern construction techniques, learnt from the target-golf constructors, but this time employed to deliver running golf on not very auspicious, arable meadow land, converting it to well- drained, pot- bunkered terrain that had a natural links feel, combined with quite outstanding sea views.


The Kingsbarns business model of being open only for seven months each year, with a pay-and-play green-fee close now to £200, has been enormously successful. Parsinen has replicated it at Castle Stuart, going the whole hog with 100% fine fescue grasses and designing more imaginative, natural, green complexes and, of course, a feature attractive to their target American audience, namely wide fairways and, again, all the visual attractions.


The building of Dundonald links, The “ 42 I PC JUNE/JULY 2014


The fertiliser and pesticide chemical companies are today on the back foot and hurriedly trying to invent new ‘natural’ products


Renaissance, Spey Valley, Machrihanish Dunes and Trump International (though opening too early, Trump has now overseeded his fairways with annual ryegrass, over which The Open is unlikely to be played) have all exemplified this as a return to a running game.


This has also been replicated across the finest recreational-based golf clubs where


amateur events have always been played on running courses, and we have Jim Arthur to thank for that. In his role as agronomist to the Open Championship courses, these venues resisted most of the fashionable urge to go ‘target-style’ in the 1980/90s. (It should be noted however that, whilst some of even these top-end links courses have been firmed-up with tons of sand, some still have bent grass greens with a majority of Poa Annua and few, if any, fescues).


Golfers are demanding higher performance greens all the year round and, though Poa annua greens, if closely shaved, can putt well in the summer months, they are often quagmires in the winter.


The deep rooted, drought and disease resistant red fescues and browntop bent grasses need the very opposite conditions to the enemy of running golf, namely the weed annual-meadow-grass (Poa annua).


For the shallow-rooting Poa to give a decently smooth putting surface, it needs to be cut low and often. However, this takes the goodness out of the grass and, to keep it alive, it has to be repeatedly replenished with expensive fertiliser and lots of water. This grass builds up dead thatch and becomes weakened in its resistance to disease, namely anthracnose in the summer and fusarium in the winter, which become rampant and, so, lots of expensive pesticides have to be added.


Fescue/Brown-top Bent turf


Grasses on Enville Golf Club


100% Fescue turf


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