
Photo by Matt LaWell, Golf Course Industry
Editor's note: Garden & Gun magazine ranked each hole of the Masters for horticultural value. Check it out at the link below.
“Augusta National is the most beautiful golf course I’ve ever stepped foot on,” says Atlanta landscape designer Alex Smith. “You don’t even have to play golf to think it’s heaven on Earth.” Smith knows of what he rhapsodizes. His firm, Alex Smith Garden Design Limited, transforms Southern estates into gracious showplaces, and he leads landscape design for the nature-intensive Top of the Rock Golf Course in the Missouri Ozarks.
An avid linksman himself, Smith has played a couple of rounds at Augusta National, where each hole is named for a plant species that graces the course. As the 2023 Masters draws near, we figure he has the keen eye to lead a hole-by-hole tour of those plantings.
Hole 1: Tea Olive (Osmanthus fragrans)
This evergreen, not-actually-an-olive shrub can grow to heights of twenty feet and doesn’t require much pruning to maintain a pleasing oval shape. “It’s a good shrub to provide a visual buffer, and Augusta is keen on hiding concessions and such,” Smith says. But it’s best known for the tiny, white, fall-blooming flowers that give off a scent similar to jasmine and orange blossoms. While it’s native to Asia, nurseries around the South still grow a tea olive cultivar that originated at Fruitland Nurseries, on the land that in 1933 became Augusta National, Smith notes.
Scorecard: Birdie
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