# The Tree Farm: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-tree-farm-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / South Carolina


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A PGA Tour player bought a pine nursery in western South Carolina and built the golf club he could not find anywhere else. That is the whole origin story of The Tree Farm, and it explains the place better than any brochure could. Zac Blair bought the property outside Aiken in 2020. The project had started life as The Buck Club, an idea Blair first planned for his home state of Utah. The land in South Carolina changed the plan, because the land was sand, rolling and covered in pines that had been grown as a nursery. Golfers who know what sand means for golf know why he stopped looking elsewhere.

The design credits tell you what kind of course Blair wanted. Tom Doak routed it. Kye Goalby and Blair designed the holes and features. That division of labor is worth pausing on: the most respected routing mind of his generation drew the map, and then the owner, a tour player with strong opinions about how golf should play, built the details alongside Goalby. The course opened for member play in the fall of 2023. It is young. Everything about it is young except the ideas behind it, which reach back to the sandhills golf of a century ago: firm ground, natural movement, holes found in the terrain rather than poured over it.

## Sand changes everything

The Tree Farm sits on sand-based rolling topography, and sand is the single best foundation a golf course can have. It drains. It plays firm. It lets the ball bounce and run, which means the ground game is alive and a well-struck shot gets rewarded with movement instead of a plugged lie in soft turf. Western South Carolina has a quiet claim on this geology, in the same sandhills band that made the Aiken area horse country long before it was golf country. The Tree Farm takes that inheritance and builds a destination club on it: private, members and guests only, the kind of place golfers travel to rather than stumble onto.

Where does it sit in the state? South Carolina's top tier is crowded with Ocean Course severity and Harbour Town precision, and we sort the whole state in [the full South Carolina ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/). The Tree Farm's case rests on different ground, literally. It is an inland, sand-based, walk-the-routing kind of course in a state whose famous golf mostly hugs the coast. That difference is the point. A member here is not buying ocean views. He is buying turf, topography, and a design team that left the land's rolls in charge.

The name deserves its own sentence. The Buck Club was a Utah idea. The Tree Farm is what the South Carolina land insisted on being called: the property grew pine trees for a living before it grew a golf course, and the rows of a working nursery leave a mark on land that a good routing reads rather than erases. Doak's routing works through that rolling, planted ground. There is a lesson in the rename. Blair did not force his original concept onto a site that argued back. He listened, changed the name, changed the state, and let the sand make the decisions. Courses built that way tend to age well, because nothing in them is fighting the property.

## The honest caveats

Two, and they are real. First, access. This is a private destination club, and there is no public window to finesse. If you do not know a member, The Tree Farm is a course you read about, which frustrates golfers who plan trips around architecture. Second, youth. A course that opened in 2023 has not yet grown into itself. The pines that gave the nursery its name and the course its name will define the playing corridors more each year, and the design will be judged differently at ten years old than at two. Fair judges should hold some verdict back.

But the bones are not a matter of patience. Routing by Doak, features by Goalby and Blair, sand under everything, and a founder who built the club he personally wanted to belong to. Most new courses open with a developer's spreadsheet behind them. This one opened with a tour player's grudge against ordinary golf, and the grudge produced the more interesting course.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.