The Augusta National Golf Club - 11 April 1997

My oldest friend by now, in both senses, deeply resents putting the clock forward in the spring because as he puts it "it spoils the evening news", by which he means that at 6.30 every evening – the main news times – he likes to draw the curtains on a darkening sky.

But after last Sunday's time change, its still daylight and this old curmudgeon doesn't want to watch the world's troubles by daylight, so he draws the heavy curtains just the same and blots out every chink of light, grumbles, pours his favourite painkiller and settles down.

Being close to his vintage, I often drop down the avenue to watch the news with him and I'd likely do this if I was a mere acquaintance for, as somebody said, "After the age of 80 all contemporaries are friends". Well the other night, we were sitting there, five small lamps on in his study and the telly. Everything suddenly went – bam! – to black.

He had to totter to the door to let in a shaft of light, seems someone, it would have to have been his wife, had put on in the kitchen a toaster and a microwave while the dishwasher was throbbing away. It was too much, so a blown fuse.

The old man's wife is the mechanic in his household and pretty soon she'd thrown the switch and Thomas Eddison's invention blazed into life again. The old man's comment was "What sort of a civilisation is this, anyway?"; an ironical comment indeed.

The first image that came flashing in on the screen was of immense flooding, people in lumberjackets staggering into each other to amass sandbags against the rising river and doing it during a blizzard. This is going on up in Minnesota and the Dakotas and the people over a stretch of land about half the size of Ireland being visited by a weird combination, a late winter blizzard and the early upsurge of the usual spring floods. And here he was, complaining of the momentary failure of one link in the elaborate chain of electronic comfort we live by.

Well I'm sorry, I meant to begin on a cheerful note for I look out of my study window and now suddenly, after a wild succession of wind and sun and bitter cold and 70 degree days, suddenly the fuzz of Central Park's woods has turned to sprightly green blossom and around a bend of the reservoir forsythia is out and white dogwood and that tree about which an English poet, by a simple switch of two words, produced a memorable line, "Loveliest of trees the cherry now".

So I'm sure I hope lots of people feel as I do that whatever horrors are recorded on the evening news in Bosnia, in Zaire, in Jerusalem wherever our guilt is a little softened by the arrival of the marvellous spring.

A terrific Anglophile I once knew said at this time of year "Oh to be in England, now that spring is there". My wife said, "Oh to be anywhere now that spring is there". Correct.

And this weekend in particular, I think of one place more than any other that I might be, where I've been going for just over 30 years but no more; down to Augusta, Georgia the only place on earth, I believe, where the best in the world play golf in a sumptuous botanical garden, 365 rolling acres with their towering Georgia pines and the azalea bushes and the white dogwood and the pink dogwood and the magnolias and firethorn and redbud and yellow jasmine.

All the native flowers of Georgia and beyond, not planted in pots, nothing remotely as disciplined and sergeant-majored as a French garden, rather bushes and spreads along the creeks and meadows here, there, everywhere, not by accident, but by a thunderbolt of God's grace or Nature's, however you prefer to say it.

This is how this vast garden came about, for nobody knows how long this tract of land in Georgia had been an indigo farm. Indigo was, after cotton, the south's most profitable export, but in the early 1850s a Belgium baron and his son, both horticulturalists newly arrived in America, liked the look of this rolling land in a valley and were taken by the plantation house only just built – a low colonial-style, arcaded white house flanked by two wings of slave quarters.

The baron bought the place in 1857 and began to convert it into what was to become the south's first commercial nursery. He and his sons searched the Southland for particular flowers, they imported trees and plants from around the world.

Within three years they issued a catalogue listing 1,300 varieties of pear and 900 varieties of apples. They were set to be early millionaires when they sounded the guns of Fort Sumpter – the opening of the civil war, 1860 to' 65, if it helps.

The plantation was turned, for the duration, into a fruit farm for the provision of the confederate armies.

After the war, there's no record that their farm, called Fruit Lands was a howling success; trees and flowers more than saleable fruits were their passion. Well, the father died and in 1910 the son died and left the property to his widow and two sons.

The land remained partly fruit farm, partly large open meadows until the middle '20s when there arrived in Augusta a very mid-1920s type, so stereotyped he went into the musical comedies of Richard Rodgers and Kern and George Gershwin – a real-estate tycoon with two-tone shoes and a roving eye, one Commodore Stoltz.

It was the time of the Florida land boom when long stretches of beach, of ocean you might almost say, were filled in and hotels built on them. Sometimes the excited investors up north learned that the hotels were never built or, if so, were underwater.

Comes now, then, this Commodore Stoltz who'd put up a dazzling hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. He looked over the far-reaching beautiful nursery, promptly bought it and announced he would here top the magnificence of his 15-storey Miami Beach hotel.

He broke ground in the late winter and in the following months laid down a branch line to the nearest railroad to haul in the sand and girder work and so on. He was ploughing under the land beyond the plantation house throughout the summer and was just about to raze that lovely little mansion when in September, God took a hand. Southern Florida was struck by the most devastating hurricane in its history.

The Commodore's Miami Beach masterpiece – all 15 storeys – and its 100ft radio tower were demolished. Incidentally, the only club he was Commodore of was that hotel, so Mr Stoltz filed for bankruptcy. It was the end of his hopes for a Stoltz chain of hotels.

So there lay, in the hands of a holding company, abandoned and after the Wall Street crash of 1929, unsold, the 365 acres with such a colourful history.

Who would redeem them and leave us with what we have today – the most beautiful inland course on earth? Enter one Clifford Roberts, a young high school dropout, a travelling salesmen who got into oil leases and in the late '20s was described in the financial papers as the Wizard of Wall Street. His wizardry, though badly dented by the Crash, had not deserted him.

He'd been in the habit of going to Augusta in the winter to play golf and stay at a local hotel, where, from time to time, stayed a young lawyer, the now immortal Robert Tyre 'Bobby' Jones, the world's leading golfer who, having conquered all four major tournaments in one year, and still an amateur, promptly retired at the age of 28.

Mr Roberts ran into him in Augusta and very soon learned from Jones that he had one ambition left – to design his own golf course.

Tapping what in those days they called contacts for money was right up Mr Roberts's alley. He also had a nose for sniffing out pieces of obscure real estate that might be bought at Depression prices. He spotted the abandoned Fruit Lands.

First he quietly collected the capital from his, well, capitalist friends, and one day he led Jones to the gate of the property. They drove up the magnolia drive to the plantation house, which God, the hurricane and the Commodore's bankruptcy had left intact.

Bobby Jones walked through the house on to the terrace where stood and stands a gnarled, monumental, live oak tree. He looked beyond what is now the long cathedral sweep of the 10th fairway and shifted his gaze across to Rae's Creek, the little bridge and the shining water.

"This," said Jones, "is the place." And so it was, and so it is.

I've talked about it and how it came about because many of you, golfers or not, wherever you are in Britain, Australia, Japan even, can get some sense of its peculiar beauty this Sunday afternoon or evening, 13 April – "The cruellest month", the poet said, "mixing memory and desire".

Well for me, certainly many memories. I mention that I am not, will not, be there this year for an inevitable, rather chilling, reason that never crossed my mind when I enthusiastically booked my motel room months ago.

All my playmates, the guys I walked the course with, and dined and drank and reminisced with – Pat Ward-Thomas, Leonard Crawley and Henry Longhurst and Peter Dobereiner and other great men you've never heard of – they're all gone.

It occurred to me, rather late in the day, that I'd be parting with a lot of dollars to fly 700 miles south for the privilege of dining alone every evening in the motel. Anyway, we hear that they had a long early spasm of heat a week or more ago and, for the first time in many, many years all the blooms are gone. Tragic.

So as it is, here I am in New York with my old friend, once a playing partner, and the barley wine and the magical new telly with the better-than-a-movie image – forget digital – and my wife, who after 50 years and getting to like the looks of Greg Norman and Freddie Couples, has become an addict and joined the gambling pool.

Maybe next week we'll act grown-up and get back to the world and its weal and its woes.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (© BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC. Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.