SPORTING ASPECT
Golf in the Garden
By BERNARD DARWIN
THERE are almost as many kinds of garden golf as there are of gardens. There is clock golf, for instance, to be bought in a box like croquet, complete with two gun- metal putters and metal numerals to mark the tees. This golf with but a single hole, given a good lawn, can be admirable practice for the earnest student of putting; he may break his back there by solitary hours of hard work, greatly to his benefit. But in order to produce something worthy of the name of game, a.. game that shall keep people playing passionate matches, till they have no time to change for dinner, the putting green must be full of slopes and runs and burrows. I once knew such a green in the possession of a distinguished golfing family which was so fascinating and agonising that I tried to imitate it on my own lawn at home. There it is still, but, alas! a mere ruin, "one with Nineveh and Tyre," buried in rank grass. It cost much labour and some money in the making since it involved the digging up of a colony of vast flints, followed by draining operations. Even so it was a failure. A deep little valley close to the hole, which was to be the cause of excruciating amuse- ment, was just too deep. All the winter it was a pool in which a large and sportive dog used to roll, and when spring came round again it was a bare and muddy marsh. Yet the game itself would have been a good game, if our ambition had not hopelessly overreached itself.
Our one hole was one too many. We should have done better with none at all, since the garden course on which I have had perhaps the best fun of all, had a series of flags, but never a single hole. It was, indeed, golf without tears in the shape of putting. The ball that was nearest to the flag after the tee shot won the hole, but that statement gives no notion of the terrors and joys of the game. The 'greens,' if they may so be termed, were minute and simply surrounded by out-of-bounds territories in the shape of gravel walks, carriage sweeps and precipitous slopes plunging into fields. I have seen golfers of the highest class teeing ball after ball in the modest hope of ultimately getting one into play. To lose one's nerve was to feel that it was quite impossible ever to keep in bounds again. On the other hand, to enjoy a rare burst of confidence was to place one tee shot after another almost touching the pin. No match was ever lost till it was won; • there was always the hope of making great breaks, as we used to term them, sudden runs of brilliance. The 'holes,' I should add, were all short, some not more than a few yards; and, as such a course requires no green-keeping and the flags can all be moved at a moment's notice, it is the perfect or for a household of divided taste and authority.
Such households there must always be, in which one partY thinks, as doubtless Mrs. Battle would have thought, that the ball must always be played where it lies, and the flower' beds can look out for themselves, while the other puts flor/- culture far above golf." I used to hear of one course on which greenhouses were legitimate hazards to be carried from the tee. The sons of that house both became eminent golfers, and this early training amid splintering glass must have steeled their nerves. The only hope of carrying a greenhouse is to keep the eye on the ball, or so I should think, for I have never tried. On the whole, I suggest that for peace and quiet's sake it should be obligatory, to lift and drop the ball under penalty from a flower-bed; but from a gravel walk a ball should he played, and it is not easy to deal with a ball jammed tightlY under the neatly-cut edge of a walk. Perhaps something could be done with the modern 'dynamiter' or blaster,' but the gardener would not like it.
One great thing. about a garden course is that it need not be too fair.' People are always grumbling on real courses, and that generally about the great holes of the world, that they are unfair. Even these dull, logical creatures would allow that garden holes may possess a 'sporting' element. I remember one course where the only hope of a two lay in a dead fall from the overhan4ing branch .of- a tree. I knew another where one hole was cut in the stump of a fallen tree. On the garden course which I loved best in all the world and on which I played in boyhood innumerable rounds, there was one hole that occasionally made me call gods and men to witness that there was no justice in the world. Yet it was essentially a glorious hole, and I -suppose some forty yards in length. The ball had to reach, and only just reach, the crest of a gentle hill between two fir trees, whence it must totter down a steeper slope on the further side. If it was hit ever so little too hard it wedged itself under railings; if too softly, it stayed on the top of the hill, metaphorically putting its finger to its nose. Perfectly struck, it lay dead for a two. That was in the far-off days of the gutty ball, and I fancy the rubber core would have been incapable of the necessary delicacy. However, that cherished course was dead before the intrusive Haskell ball was born.
That was for me the best loved of all garden courses, but truth compels the admission that saVe for one hole it was not an outstanding one. I have known one really great course, ill a different class from all the others, in a Hampshire garden. It had the distinction that not only golf, but A Midsummer Night's Dream had been played on it, and the green stage, with its perfect woodland glade behind, was, I remember, on the edge of the first putting green. This was garden golf on a grand scale, for if there were one or two tiny holes of an infinite trickiness, there was one that involved a carry of over a hundred yards on to a small plateau guarded by a thick hedge. This hedge, dividing the lawn into two terraces, was a great feature; it was like the ubiquitous Barry Burn at Car- noustie, which is always bobbing up in a fresh place. Like that stream, it consumed many balls, and would have proved ruinous but for a charming black Labrador who periodically plunged in to the rescue. So great a course was this that I used always to insist on breaking the owner's rule that only two clubs were allowed—a mashie and a putter. There was one magnificent hole that cried aloud for a running shot with what would today be called a No. 4.
Finally, there is in a Devon garden a putting course, per- fectly kept, of an icy pace, and of such diabolical design that it is calculated in the course of one week-end to break the strongest nerve. It is productive at once of the most heavenly fun and of the dreadful disease known as 'putting staggers. I have seen the greatest of all ladies putt out of bounds there.
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