golf, teach yourself

This one thing that is obvios and indisputable about golf is that in order to play it we have clubs. There was a time when Sir Winston Churchill was able, with a fair degree of accuracy, to describe the game rather dismissively thus: “Trying to cnock a tiny ball into an even smaller hole with implements ill-suited to their purpose.”
However, that was decades ago and now the implements available are very much suited to their purpose, although it may take a while before the beginner totally accepts this. Just remember that whatever its intricacies – and it can be made to sound very complicated indeed – golf is essentially a simple game. For Henry Cotton, three times Open champion and a teacher of note, arter more than 50 years in the game, good, consistent golf boiled sown to ‘the ability to find the back of the ball with the clubhead square’. Too much golfing shorthand? We hope this book will help you understand the concept and that your own experiments and experience will give you a feel for it. Your aim is to bring the club into contact with the ball in such a way that it results in a cleanly his shot. A club is not an alien implement of torture, it is a useful and necessary tool that can learn to use well if you want to.
Start right
Luther Blacklock, an Advanced Fellow of the PGA who has been the professional at Woburn for many years, is adamant that the correct equipment is vital. ‘Imagine a six-foot adult trying to learn to ride on a bike designed for a six-year-pld. It woukd make the learning process extremely difficult and could lead to injury. It cannot be overstated how important it is to learn golf with clubs that are rhe correct length and weight for each individual. Do not fall into the trap of thinking, “I’m just a beginner so it doesn’t matter what clubs I have as long as they’re inexpensive”. Thr correct equipment will encourage the correct swing for your physique, accelerating the learning curve.
Golf is an outdoor game played over diverse tarrain so it is inevitable that you will find yourself in trouble from time to time, no matter how good you become. The trick is to accept is as part of the game and extricaye yourself as efficiently as possible in the fewest number of strokes. As you progress learn what you yourself are capable of: what shot you can attempt and wgat shots are beyond you. Get out of trouble as soon as you can leave the attempted heroics to other (as a general rule). In some circumstances you’ll be unable to play a shot at all and will have to declare the ball unplayable and take what’s know as a penalty drop, adding a stroke to your score. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and is frequently a better bet than hacking away getting cross and going nowehere.
Bukers
We’re going to start with bunkrts becouse many beginners are petrifies of bunkers. They are petrified of being in the them becouse they feel that they are not going to get out and they are petrified of being behind one becouse they feel that vety shortly they are going to be in it – and unable to get out. Every player who over the years has kearned a degree of competency at the game can recall the days when when bunkers represented an impossible obstacle and becouse you knew you couldn’t get out is became s self-fulfilling prophency that you went in.

the brother gardeners

finally, on 25 september, five years after he had gathered his seeds fot collinsin, bartram saddled his horse, packed food, paper, boxes and ox bladders in which to keep the specimens fresh, as well as the clothes and compass that collinson had equipped him with, and set off in the puring rain. The journey to Williamsburg took fifteen days through rain that rarely let up, but eventually Bartram reached John Custis’s house just as the sun was setting. His fortitude was rewarded. Not only did Custis own one of the finest houses in town, he also had a four-acer garden whoch was reputed to be one of yhe best stocked in virginia. There bartram saw a horse chestnut, a tree which he had been desperante to grow ever since collinson had so vividly described the cendle-like white blossom. The horse chesnut was not native to britain, having been introduced from albania and macedonia only in the early seventeenth century but it was soon one of the most popular trees. cultivating it in pennsylvania proved more difficult. although the sapling in custis’s garden was only a foot high, bartram, who had never succeeded in raising even a seedling, was deeply impressed. Interesting too were the twenty-year-old English hollies and yews, which were clipped onto balls and pyramids – custis adored in particular the species with variegated leaves, although he admitted that “I am told those things are out of fashion’. But the combination of the severe winter of 1737 and the drought over the previos months had keft the low box hedges that bordered the flowerbeds looking brown and parched. Even though three slaves had watered the plants every evening and built arbours to creatr shade, many European plants had been damaged, leaving the garden stripped, ‘[O]ur poor country grows more unseasonable yaerly’, Custis complained.

richard mabey

this all went to may head, and I turned into a kind of wood-crawler, out on many own hunt for intinations of antiquity, searching for the coded sings of continuity. Wiids named after their parishes, not after some self-aggrandising owner. Woods with curious chapes and wavering biundaries, not the straight edges of planned plantations, Medieval banks and ditches. Old coppice stools, as wide as small pounds. Suites of plants with poor colonising powers-wood sorrel, wood anemome, woodruff-that kept ti the old woods where they’d first grown. I loved becoming aware, for the first time in my life, of natural structure, of the arrangement of older trees and young saplings, the changing patterns of light and density and species as you passed from slope to plateau, from dry soil to wet. All these chacters and qualities gave each ancient wood a unique identity. They felt, I wrote at the time, like life-rafts out of the past’.
I spent as much time browsing maps as I did prowling through the undergrowth, dowsing the outlines and positions of woosa for hints. I tried so spot patterns in scatters of woods that might once have been joined, scrutinised their names for hints of provenance. And that is how, poring over a large-scale Ordnance Survey sheet of my home range, I discovered that the green haze at yhe end of my teenage valley, the remote wood that i gazed at but never visited, had a name. It was called Heathen Grove. I coulsn’t imagine what this meant. A site of diabolical goings-on(there were many ‘Dell’s Woods’ – i.e. Devil’s Woods-round about)? A memorial to a [lucky Enlightenment atheist? I badly wanted to see it, but getting in was another matter. It lay on the top of a steep ridge, barricaded on three sides by the barbed-wire fences of a notoriously irascible farmer. On the fourth was a long and almost equally imprnrtrable thicket of larch trees and thorny chalk-scrub.

As i walked back home, I stopped at hte gate where I used to gaze out at this trumblingg muddle of wood as a teenager. In my mind I stripped away the layers of growth I’d struggled through. The larches, planted by Italian prisiners during the Second Warld War. The dense scrub that had grown up om chalk downland, maybe in the agricultular depression of the 1930s. And what was left was just that lonely beechwood, sitting on top of the ridge at the head of the valley. The name now made some kind of sence. It looked like the kind of hilltop plantation popular with 18th-century landoweners, hoping to echo the groves they fancied were once used for pagan worship. But if that were its origin, how did those ancient woodland plants get there? The transactions of the veech with time were still mysterious to me.
Yet, ironically, this revelation in my own heartland made me disenchanred with many of rje other beechwoods I was beginning to explore. Few of them had the Dazzling floral sjow of Heathen Grove. Some had precious few ground plants at all. They were monotonous, even-aged, unrelieved by other trees. I knew from maps that most of them on the sites of ancient woods, but they’d been simplified sometime to favour trees suitable for commercial timber. I was sure that the trees in ‘natural’ beechwoods(whatever that meant) must have been more varied, a muddle of different species and ages and forms, like the grove round the Qeen Beech The timber beeches looked vulnerable, too.