British Open rough at Royal Troon is beautiful to ecologists

“We are all now starting to recognize,” Bob Taylor said by telephone from England, “that golf courses are more than just the golf course. They’re actually nature preserves.”

He has tried to convince people of this, he said, for only about 35 years. He is, after all, an ecologist.

To view a lifelong sight such as a golf course with fresh eyes and senses, listen to an ecologist.

“It’s a real rainbow out there,” said Sophie Olejnik, also from England, after citing “hundreds of different wildflowers and grasses, and then the insects and the mammals and the birds.”

She knows them all and revels in them all because she, like Taylor and sometimes collaborating with Taylor, has lent expertise to the decade-or-so-long ecology embrace of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, the overseer of the British Open that is “very tuned-in on all of this and very sensitive to all of this,” Taylor said. It’s not some do-good diversion, he and Olejnik explained. It has direct relevance to the golf, not to mention helping a greenskeeper such as Troon’s Calum Donald help golf and ecology dance a win-win minuet.

Back in the primitive days of, say, last century, an errant shot might go right on into the jungle portion of the rough, treating the crowd to some wanted sadism but also unwanted delays. Nowadays, ecologists and greenskeepers have tended to what Taylor and Olejnik explained as a “fringing rough,” a four-meter-wide band of rough nearer the fairway and “managed most intensely,” Taylor said, with more space, less thickness and twin benefits. More wildlife can thrive within it while fewer golf balls can hide within it, minimizing the occasions when everybody spends half an hour watching some poor schlub go ball-hunting.

A golfer standing at a tee, Taylor said, might look down and see the foliage and feel an onset of an unwelcome shred of timidity, but he oughtn’t. “From the tee,” he said, “it will look very penal, but once you get there …”

“You can see [the ball], you can find it, and it’s wonderful,” Olejnik said.

“Golf is more enabled,” Taylor said, soon adding, “Any ball that’s slightly errant, it’s going to get caught up and you’re going to be able to find it and be able to play it.”

“If you do end up in the rough beyond the fringing rough,” Olejnik said, “you should be penalized.”

That would be “further offline,” Taylor said, where “you’ve got some very rank grasses,” less-managed and residing in a “more productive vegetation, we’d say: competitive species, so, thicker, taller, all competing with each other so they’re taking up the space, not leaving any space for the golf ball.”

That’s where balls must venture if desiring to hide forever.

Royal Troon, as it happens, is more than the famed, adorable and cantankerous Postage Stamp (No. 8, 123 yards); and the hole beside the occasional trains bolting by (No. 11, 498 yards), the Railway, which Jack Nicklaus once called the toughest in all of pro golf; and the longest British Open hole of all (No. 6, 623 yards), with its grand display of nature. It’s also a Site of Special Scientific Interest, meaning it’s rich in its welcome of all of our friends from the natural world, as well as a place where Taylor can say, “We are reinforcing the dynamism, or the mobility, of the sand dunes.”

Ecological reports about Troon brim with words and terms seldom used in polite conversation: “ribwort plantain,” “sweet vernal grass,” “marram,” “red fescue,” “sea lyme,” “bulbous buttercup,” “sheep’s sorrel,” “Yorkshire fog,” “kidney vetch,” “Isle of Man Cabbage” (a plant endemic to the British Isles) and, of course, “gorse.” Sometimes, when golfers on some course encounter Olejnik and wonder what she’s doing out there, she explains the intricacies of their surroundings. “They sort of perk up,” she said, “and have this realization that there’s a lot more than golf here — all the benefits of having that wildness around you as you play a round.”

Who knew the gorse, while earning its brutish reputation “maybe because it’s spiky and it hurts when you try and find a golf ball in there,” Olejnik said, also remains “important from a strategic point of view and an ecological point of view”? Looking like a squat tree and often like the closest thing to any tree around here, it’s scrub sheltering nesting birds such as yellowhammer, linnet and whitethroat, she points out, mammals and amphibians who “hunker down among the roots.”

Roles are many and multifarious in the rainbow flourishing around the golfers and the galleries. Marram is “what builds the dunes,” she said, “so really it’s the bodybuilder of grasses,” hanging more around the coastal edge. Heather would be the “fancy old auntie wearing purple.” Sweet-vernal grass would be a “lovely straw-colored grass which smells like freshly mowed hay and tastes like vanilla” — not that she’s encouraging patrons this week to eat from the vegetation.

So while they’re going around trying to help out nature with tasks such as minimizing the effects of nitrogen or of the plant Japanese rose (it’s not native to the area and doesn’t play so well with others), they’re also hoping to boost the golf. Even the rains of 2024 here, affecting as they’ve been with the growth, haven’t had the same effect as they would have in yore because, Olejnik said, “Troon has been managing their fringing rough for years now.”

“All the bodies protecting our countryside,” Taylor said, “are saying, ‘Wow, this is good because it’s a golf course, not despite that it’s a golf course, as [they used to say].’”

It’s something else amid the modernity here these days, when you can go to a food truck beside No. 2 and get a vegan hot dog made of sunflower seeds, one sumptuous enough to make the gulls hover. It’s also a rainbow out there. “I don’t want to see the word ‘weeds’ anywhere,” Olejnik said. “There’s no such thing as a ‘weed.’”