Turf tourism

I went for a walk in Kumamoto yesterday morning to take a few photos of the grass on the Kumamoto City Tram. This page shows how the grass sections are installed.

Last month I made a trip to Hua Hin and visited two of the fine golf courses there—Royal Hua Hin GC and Banyan GC (now Pineapple Valley GC Hua Hin).

Mike Richardson shared an image of aerifying half a green at a time. The purpose of this, the superintendent said, was to always have a good surface for the hole.

From June of 1932, when he arrived in Tokyo, until the war between the United States and the Empire of Japan began in December 1941, Joseph Grew served as the United States Ambassador to Japan.

As I say at the end of every year, it was another extraordinary year for studying grass around the world. In 2018 I took 107 flights for a total distance of 314,748 km (195,575 miles).

There are a couple amazing courses that you won’t find on the usual maps of golf clubs in Japan. Most golfers I talked with this year had no idea that there were courses there.

On August 23 at 4 a.m., Andrew McDaniel and I walked into a 7-11 in Fukuoka to get the latest issue of Weekly Golf Digest. Golf magazines in Japan are pretty amazing to begin with.

Last week I was in California for the U.S. Amateur Championship at Pebble Beach. I was running on a trail in the Del Monte Forest on Saturday when I came to an open area called The Meadow.

There is a really interesting manga comic this year in the Japanese weekly パーゴルフ (Par Golf) magazine. Newest edition is on the shelves. This manga is definitely getting a bit interesting.

This is an interesting story about a common grass that rarely appears in a lawn as just a single species – as a monostand. But at an especially high profile location in Bangkok, the lawns are almost pure javagrass (Polytrias indica).