Palmetto Golf Club

Favorite Hole

No. 4, par 4, 388 yards

This mid-length par 4 sits elegantly on the land: from the tee, the hole works downhill and across a left-to-right slope before turning subtly left, in reverse camber, as it climbs to a green benched into a rise. This strategic geometry rewards players who resist the terrain. Drives that hold the high left side of the fairway open up the most direct look at the angled green. Let the ball drift toward the outside of the dogleg, though, and the approach becomes semi-blind, with a forced carry over a large hollow that guards the front-right corner of the putting surface. The lone fairway bunker is perfectly positioned. If you were to remove it, longer hitters chasing the ideal angle would aim for exactly that spot. In typical Palmetto fashion, the green’s short-grass surrounds are intricately shaped, creating a range of short-game possibilities.

The fourth at Palmetto provides a lesson in restrained golf architecture, generating ample interest with just one bunker, a natural slope, and a skillfully contoured green complex.

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Overall Thoughts

Lately I’ve been thinking about how the concept of “design language” pertains to golf. The term comes from the world of branding, where it refers to the visual system that defines a brand's personality. Certain watch brands, for instance, have ultra-recognizable design languages — Rolex with its sporty Oyster cases and “cyclops” date-window lenses; Nomos with its minimalist, Bauhaus-influenced dials. Each Rolex and Nomos watch offers a different spin on a broader idiom that the brand has developed over time.

I’ve realized recently that the best sets of greens are similar: they establish a coherent, distinctive architectural vocabulary, then explore variations within it.

Palmetto Golf Club’s greens are an excellent example. What defines their design language is not so much their internal contouring as their surrounds: the irregular mounds, spines, swales, and channels of closely mown turf along the edges of the putting surfaces. If you miss a green at Palmetto, you will typically face a shot over one of these features, and you’ll be able to use almost any club in the bag, from putter to lob wedge to hybrid. Formal greenside bunkering is relatively sparse; the primary hazard is the combination of contour and short grass. My favorites include the sixth green, which is propped against the slope on the left with a pair of flanking mounds on the right, and the 11th, where a single knob eats into the back of the kidney-shaped putting surface, torturing recoveries after long misses.

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Who deserves credit for these greens isn't entirely clear to me. While it's well-documented that Alister MacKenzie converted Palmetto’s 19th-century sand greens to grass in 1932, I don’t know how much he altered the originals.* But the answer is probably: quite a bit. Sand greens were usually flat and oval-shaped for ease of maintenance. Palmetto's current greens have knobby shoulders, sharp tilts, and the occasional interior shelf. Indeed, they bear a family resemblance to what MacKenzie was building during the same period at Augusta National.

(*If anyone has more detailed information on this issue, let me know in the comments. I’m happy to update this paragraph.)

The routing, however, is not as accomplished as what MacKenzie might have produced on the same property. One trademark of MacKenzie’s routings — or any successful routing, really — is that the greens consistently occupy compelling natural landforms. At Palmetto, a number of greens sit on fairly nondescript ground. Since the property contains plenty of topographical variety, I have to assume that Herbert Leeds and his collaborators missed a few suitable green sites. Also, the three-hole finish on the west side of the clubhouse, a remnant of the club's original four-hole loop, feels cramped and cut off from the rest of the round.

Still, Palmetto’s routing succeeds in one important respect: finding several outstanding natural holes. The fourth, sixth, eighth, and 12th use their terrain to especially striking effect. And on holes that occupy less inspiring land — such as the third and fourth — strategic bunkering and inventive green designs carry the day.

Much of Palmetto’s current charm, though, should be credited to the club's careful stewardship over the past 25 years. Working with Tom Doak and Gil Hanse, the club has restored MacKenzie's naturalized bunkering and recaptured the scale of the fairways and greens. The agronomy matches these architectural nods to the past, with maintained turf at the center of the playing corridors fading into scruffy expanses of sand, scrub, and pine at the edges. Many clubs in the Southeast strain toward Augusta National's wall-to-wall perfection. Palmetto does something more interesting: it shows what the best golf courses in this region looked like before they went upscale.

2 Eggs

(How We Rate Courses)

Palmetto shares many characteristics with Woking Golf Club: roots in the Victorian Era, a star-studded design lineage, a max yardage under 6,700, bold green architecture, a handful of world-class par 4s, refined but unfussy maintenance, a few clunky holes, a lived-in sense of place, a polite resistance to modernization, and an elegant yet unpretentious club culture.

Woking, as I indicated in my recent profile, is very much my cup of tea. So is Palmetto. I am actively biased in favor of this type of old-fashioned, subtle, quirky, sporty, play-it-every-day-and-never-get-bored golf course. Is two Eggs a little high? Perhaps. But I can’t bring myself to give it just one.

Course Tour

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