Environmentally Friendly Course Ready For Play Opposing Forces Compromise On New Layout Outside Boston

On a golf course, green is the putter’s stage, the professional’s payday and the color of slacks at the country club. For environmentalists, it is a symbol for those who want to keep nature natural.

Little else is shared by the two sides, or at least that’s the way it had been. Now, there’s a new spirit of cooperation, and nowhere is it more apparent than at Widow’s Walk, the nation’s most environmentally friendly golf course.

They’ve done everything in the natural way here, it seems, but bring in grazing cattle to keep the fairways trimmed. And they’ve done it using fewer pesticides, and about half as much water as a typical course - concessions that leave large patches of brown grass.

“You’ve got the golf industry on one hand and the environmentalists on the other. They’re usually pretty much like this,” said course superintendent Jeff Carlson, banging his fists together. “They selected Widow’s Walk as their project, to see if they could work together.

“Most likely, it’s what you’re going to see in the future.”

Over the years, architects, groundskeepers and players were becoming more sensitive to nature’s needs. Water was rationed. Pesticides and fertilizers were avoided. Courses were set up to blend in with their surroundings.

Widow’s Walk, which opens Thursday in this quaint seaside town south of Boston, takes the approach further than ever before.

The idea behind the 6,409-yard, par-72 public course was first discussed in Pebble Beach in 1995.

A nonprofit group founded by Robert Redford held a “Golf and the Environment” conference there to try to smooth out problems between the greens crowd and the green crowd. The result was a position paper designed to change the notion that an “environmentally friendly golf course” is an oxymoron.

They also chose two sites as their testing grounds: one existing course to be reformed, at the Presidio in San Francisco, and one new course, Widow’s Walk, to be designed with the new principles in mind.

“Initially there was an awful lot of mistrust,” said Paul Parker, a vice president of the Center for Resource Management in Salt Lake City. “The golf world is a world onto itself, and so is the environmental community.

“The golf world saw the environmentalists as attacking them unfairly, not understanding what they do. And I think the environmental movement was driven by this perception of Augusta National.”

Augusta, with its bright green grass and pristine water hazards, is a model for the perfectly manicured course.

Well, all that green grass takes water - 200,000 gallons a day or more - and chemicals, lots and lots of chemicals. Courses have been known to put dye in their ponds to make the water sparkle blue. And who knows what animals were displaced, what wildlife disrupted to put the course there in the first place.

In short, golf courses can wreak havoc on the environment. Compounding the problem is that planners usually prefer sites near woodlands or wetlands.

Such is the case at Widow’s Walk, named after the rooftop lookouts where whalers’ wives would climb, praying for their husbands’ return.

The town’s water wellfield is in the middle of the driving range, wetlands are scattered throughout the site and at least one moorehen - only five of the birds have been spotted in the state - has made the course its home.

“There aren’t a lot of golf sites left that aren’t near something environmentally sensitive,” Carlson said.

To blend in, Widow’s Walk uses natural bayberry brush in place of rough wherever practical - a hazard for golfers but a boon for flora and fauna. A border collie named Lilly chases geese off the fairways. Vernal pools were added to connect the existing wetlands.

The third fairway bridges a stream that would ordinarily be diverted, preserving a natural habitat. Greens clippings are recycled, mixed with soil and seed and used to fill divots on the tees. Everywhere else, the cut grass is left where it is mowed.

The cart paths are made mostly from recycled asphalt. And a birder has hung boxes in the trees, trying to persuade the 74 species spotted on the grounds to stick around, and encourage more to come.

“Everything is left a little more pristine,” said Clyde Gurney, an 80-year-old hobbyist who is attempting to establish a purple martin colony behind the driving range. “Trees are left right where they fell. For birds, that’s heaven.”

Some golfers may think they’re roughing it with all the brown grass and rest of the natural surroundings. Carlson’s response: “That’s the way it is. That’s nature.”

The course is also a laboratory of sorts. There are three different types of greens, and their progress with varying amounts of water and pesticides will be monitored.