Towards a greener green

There was a time—the ‘70s and ‘80s—when golf course designers built their courses in incongruous settings. They looked like perfect, transplanted landscapes, which bore no relation to the surrounding terrain. But it was tremendously expensive.

And the environmentalists cried foul. So today, the trend is to work with natural character of the site. An altogether greener approach to a putting green.

“That’s why you see this shift towards links courses,” says K.D. Bagga of Bagga Golf Management Group, a team of course architects.

A links course is, by definition, moulded from the natural terrain, so it’s easier to maintain. Typically, it hugs a coastline, though some are inland, like the Golden Greens Resort near Gurgaon. “Golf course design is all about recreating nature. If you divorce nature, you lose the aesthetics of the course.”

One of the greatest environmentalist complaints has been water conservation— golf courses are enormously thirsty. It’s an issue that’s particularly key in India. “With most courses planning for resorts, hotels and housing estates, there is obviously more water use,” says Bagga. “And that means more domestic effluent. So, if that can be recycled through a sewage treatment plant, it can be used on the course.” It’s a win-win all round—less water is wasted and the nutrient-heavy discharge is perfect for turf maintenance. Even players benefit from water conservation. “Look at the bigger bunkers you see these days,” says Bagga. “Not only do they reduce water use and maintenance costs, but they also create visual fear for the player.”

This is what Bagga calls “integrity of design”—marrying environmental concerns with the additional imperative of creating challenges for the player. It’s his guiding philosophy when it comes to positioning bunkers, rough areas, swales and multi-sloping greens.

For a game as maddeningly difficult as golf, you wouldn’t have thought it would be a concern to keep the player challenged. But with advanced golfclub and ball technology, “Tiger Woods types” can hit the ball that much further, so demanding longer courses. And this isn’t a universally welcome trend. According to Rishi Narain, a former tour professional who now runs a golf event management company, club golfers are getting a raw deal. “The new technology benefits professional tour players, so championship tees are now 7,500 yards long compared to 7,200 yards 15 years ago,” he says. “But for an average player to enjoy the game, you still need tees at 6,500 yards.”

Furthermore, you often can’t just lengthen an existing course. Spiralling land costs get in the way, and there’s the environmental aspects once more. Ronald Fream, Founder of course architecture firm Golfplan, has been in the business for 40 years. He studied the ecological impact of golf courses in the 1960s, back when ‘green’ was just a colour.

“Architects are more sensitive to the environment because governments are forcing them to,” he says. Today, we know how to spell ‘environment’.