Turf tourism

Last week I was in California for the U.S. Amateur Championship at Pebble Beach. I was running on a trail in the Del Monte Forest on Saturday when I came to an open area called The Meadow.

There is a really interesting manga comic this year in the Japanese weekly パーゴルフ (Par Golf) magazine. Newest edition is on the shelves. This manga is definitely getting a bit interesting.

This is an interesting story about a common grass that rarely appears in a lawn as just a single species – as a monostand. But at an especially high profile location in Bangkok, the lawns are almost pure javagrass (Polytrias indica).

As I say at the end of every year, it has been another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. See these links for some of my favorite photos (and flight maps) from 2015 and 2016.

When I led a seminar in Idaho last month about Turf Around the World, I wanted to show a map of the flights I’d taken this year. I didn’t have a map to show then, however, because of some software problems.

The idea that golf courses in Japan with the two green system have a summer green and a winter green is not quite correct. Nor is the two green system used exclusively with one warm-season grass green and one with cool-season grass.

Golf architect Paul Jansen is in the midst of what he calls the Sustainable by Design tour. He is making an intensive tour around South and Southeast Asia, visiting and studying some of the most interesting places and golf courses.

I took 82 flights in 2016, for a total of 221,494 km (137,000 miles), and I’ve just mapped them. That’s more than 5 times the circumference of the earth. Routes flown once are more blue, and the routes flown more often are more red.

When Eric Reasor flew from Tennessee to Thailand, he brought along measuring tools to assess how golf balls roll across putting greens. He visited 22 golf courses in 5 days.

I made a map of all the flights I took in 2015.1 After seeing the map, I scrolled through my photos from these places. It was an extraordinary year for studying grass around the world.