From garden to table: At
Ridgewood CC in New
Jersey, manager Eban Ross
tends to the club’s
vegetable and herb garden,
which adds an unbeatable
freshness to the menu
items.
What’s ironic about this is that, according
to Rossi, the quest for “better” turf—which,
because it is healthier, has the added benefit
of being more absorbent and therefore causing less runoff—is not what is slowing the
movement toward full environmental compliance. It’s aesthetics. “Let’s not talk about how
it looks,” Rossi says. “How do you want it to
“A club can use its
environmental programs
as a marketing tool to
attract a younger
generation of members.”
play ? Make decisions on playability. And as
you make decisions on playability, you automatically become more environmentally
responsible, as long as you’re not talking
about crazy speeds on greens. Having a fast
green is easy—if it doesn’t have to be green.
You go to Europe, they have greens that run
10, but they’re straw brown.”
Building a new course while exercising
environmental restraint takes a bit more time
and planning, but the results can be just as
superb. Rees Jones proved that almost twenty
years ago while building Atlantic Golf Club,
in environmentally super-sensitive Bridgehampton. Indeed, the course would not have
been built at all had he and developer Lowell Schulman not reached out to powerful
South Fork environmental groups right from
the start. Their challenge was to preserve the
property’s glacial landscape and to protect the
habitat of two endangered species: the northern harrier hawk, the only hawk that hunts by
sound, and the eastern tiger salamander.
Jones allows that he was at first disappointed
that he would not be permitted to take the
course down into even one of the site’s
distinctive kettle holes. In the end, though,
he thinks it made for a better course since it
forced him to take his cues from the ground
itself. “By saving the wetlands, we’ve gone
back to the land, like yesteryear,” muses
