2023-05-17 00:20:13
Oak Hill, the spectacular setting for the PGA Championship, is a botanical masterpiece, a tangible demonstration that natural life always finds a place for itself in the land, even when it is dying from years and years of wear and tear. abuse. Surrounded by picture-perfect oak groves, this golf haven in Rochester, New York State was a barren wasteland a century ago, plagued by uncontrolled crop management. The original field was not there, but several miles away on a small farm on the banks of the Genesee River, but his partners, initially skeptical, reached an agreement with the University for a mutually beneficial exchange of land. The academic institution would build the new campus in a highly valued area and golf lovers would gain space to build two 18-hole courses.
The sport of woods and irons was almost a newcomer to this corner of Canada, but little by little it gained followers and the club became one of the region’s social benchmarks. It was necessary to build a house so that the partners could meet and also to invite and entertain prominent visitors from the county. And they opted for a majestic Tudor-style building that still presides over the 36 flags that mark the greens of an enclosure designed by Donald Ross, one of the most famous architects of the time. In 1926 it was already possible to play in the two fields and the members were delighted with the facilities. But something was missing. The green was bare of vegetation, like a gigantic field with no defined horizon. There were no trees to separate the fairways and make it difficult to hit the greens. It was like an unfinished drawing because very few thought that in a land ‘burned’ by crops different types of trees could grow to color it.
At this point in the story, the figure of Dr. John R. Williams emerges, a restless local doctor eager to open up to other areas of knowledge. Pioneering researcher in the use of insulin to treat diabetes, he was also passionate about bocanics and horticulture and had turned the garden of his residence into an open-air laboratory where he tested the strength of the ground to breathe life into certain species.
acorns
As soon as he closed the practice and visited the patients in the nearby houses, he devoted himself body and soul to his hobby to improve the appearance of the fields. A hobby that finally completely changed its physiognomy because Williams, after constant trial and error, took a risk and decided to sow the deserted areas of the streets with a large number of acorns from the different oak specimens in the world.
As the trees began to grow – thousands and thousands of oaks, maples and elms – it became clear that the chance coincidence of Ross and Williams on the same project gave birth to a “masterpiece”, as the club’s officials maintain. “I stopped counting at 75,000,” the doctor replied when asked about the number of fruits that he had scattered along the route. And he always added: “The Almighty was the greatest landscape architect of all. His plan was to have oak trees in Oak Hill ».
One hundred years after that ‘occurrence’ the Rochester course has become an international reference. At the beginning of this century, it was the only one in the United States that had hosted the six main rotating men’s tournaments, in addition to the 1995 Ryder Cup. A lover of botany worked the miracle.
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