SOMEWHERE IN THE ROUGH, 15TH HOLE, COMMONGROUND GOLF COURSE — Joe McCleary is crawling on hands and knees, peering between patches of volunteer alfalfa and brome grass stubble, desperate for a prize.
It’s not a No. 4 Titleist he’s grubbing for deep in the rough at CommonGround Golf Course, a red-tailed hawk circling overhead as if to mock the search. That would be a fair assumption, given McCleary’s affinity for the game and his years of golf course executive positions.
But no, McCleary’s elusive treasure is a blue flax bud the size of a thumbtack. He finds one, gently cups it to display for Denver Botanic Gardens biologist Becky Hufft squatting a few feet away, then looks to his left. Two feet away is another blue flax, visible through a squint against the straw background of dormant brome. Then two more, and another, and a couple more, on down the row made two years ago by the golf course aerator. Course maintenance staff followed the aerator and tamped wildflower seeds curated by Hufft into the holes, wishing them luck against drought, hungry rabbits and burrowing mice.
And it’s working.
The collaboration between the botanic gardens and Colorado Golf Association, which owns and runs CommonGround at Lowry as a teaching and demonstration course, was meant to build native habitat in the rough that would at once attract wildlife and resist drought. Gardens staffers are always looking for new places to experiment with plants in real-life environments. And golf leaders want to show they can do more with their open space than flood it with precious water and hit it with dubious chemicals.
Three years after the link-up began, blue flax and blue grama are poking through the CommonGround rough even after a record-dry winter. Birding clubs walk the wetlands once a month to marvel at mountain bluebirds nesting near the second hole. Peregrine falcons have raised a brood. Denver Water has a test plot between holes 9 and 11 to show whether waterwise seed-scapes thrive more after tilling or simple mowing.
“It’s pretty amazing once you get out here how many seeds have survived the three years,” said Hufft, crawling between budding groupings of prairie coneflower and blue flax.
McCleary puts one cheek to the ground and looks down a row, spotting flax at short-putting intervals. “Look at it here,” he gestures to Hufft. “You can see the plug pattern. Boom, boom, boom.”
The course is managed for water conservation and quality
Until recently, the botany-inspired McCleary would get puzzled stares at horticulture conventions with his Colorado Golf Association nametag. (He is the recently retired chief sustainability officer.)
“What are you doing here?” the skeptical botanists would ask, McCleary said.
Now, the Colorado Golf Association is hosting regular conversations with other golf trade groups about everything from plantings, to watering schedules, to training programs that attempt to recruit green-friendly high school groundskeepers alongside future caddies and players.
McCleary wants more golf courses to directly address public ire, which in drought years can loom as large as an emerald 300-yard fairway.
“You better start figuring out what the message is going to be, because it is a challenging message,” McCleary said. “You just have to show that you’re managing things responsibly.”
At forward-thinking courses like CommonGround, formerly Mira Vista, that means watering fairways with recycled, nonpotable stormwater or wastewater. It means shepherding the bottomlands flows through cattail wetlands that filter fertilizer and pollutants from the water before it leaves the Lowry property.
And it means having groundskeeping staff with a toolbox full of varied moisture sensors they can jam into the greens to know exactly what mix of water, salt and other important nutrients or growth inhibitors are in the soil.
Hufft herself, a nongolfer, was skeptical about the possibilities of what she saw as golf monoculture before she came out to CommonGround at McCleary’s invitation. She thought the phone message was sent to the wrong botanic gardens staffer.
“My initial reaction was, gosh, I thought they wanted a landscape designer. I don’t think they want a restoration ecologist,” Hufft said.
But on her first visit, she could see the wetlands, and the rough begging for native flowers, and the stands of raptor-sheltering cottonwoods along Westerly Creek.
Then McCleary showed her a regional map reflecting CommonGround’s position at the southeastern edge of a vast blank spot, encompassing the old Lowry Air Force Base that closed in 1994, the Westerly flood-control dam, athletic field complexes and park space.
“I was thinking, this is the largest open space in this area. This is where animals and plants can use habitat and move through,” Hufft said. “If it were not a golf course, it would not be a wildlife preserve. It would be buildings. Or it’d be houses, using their own water. This is an amazing opportunity, right?”
McCleary and Hufft said the Denver Botanic Gardens collaboration with CommonGround is the only such partnership they’ve heard of nationwide.
“If this golf course was in another part of the country, let’s say Illinois or Georgia, they could have a similar relationship with their arboretum, their botanic garden,” McCleary said.
A low-risk project resulted in lots of habitat gains
When the Army Corps of Engineers built Westerly Creek Dam, they planted the contoured leftovers with what every engineering department in the West has done for decades: nonnative crested wheatgrass and smooth brome. The CommonGround course staff now carries around buckets of wildflower mixes looking like a very healthy and barely digestible breakfast cereal, containing pollinator and wildlife lures like buffalo grass, blanket flower, bee balm and goldenrod.
The clubhouse was one of the first projects, tucked inside a waterwise landscape of summer blooms, native grasses and walkways of pea gravel.
Later interventions focused on using the groundskeeping equipment the golf course already had, like aerators, instead of bringing in large tillers or earthmovers for deeper contours.
“The bees and the butterflies, the moths, they find these flowers pretty quickly, because there’s not much else out there, other than a couple of non-natives, like thistles and alfalfa,” Hufft said. “So it was a really cool, very low-stakes, low risk, low-input project that had quite a bit of gain to it.”
In more involved projects, the collaborators are testing how best to grow dryland native plants in new areas. Side-by-side test beds prepare the ground with herbicides, tilling or black plastic sheeting that kills weeds with solar energy, and measures best results after replanting.
Hufft stops her golf cart near a car-size rabbitbrush and gets out for a stroll. The Botanic Gardens crew had encouraged the groundskeepers to leave the native rabbitbrush growing in the rough rather than mow it down with the brome and wheatgrass. It’s now throwing off dozens of seedlings in clusters dotting a 10-yard radius, while the mother plant offers shelter to rabbits and birds and forage to deer.
“Once you start to look,” Hufft gestures, noting flax and prairie coneflower between the rabbitbrush stands, “you see bunches. Oh my gosh. This is awesome.”