RIVER CITY JOURNAL: FORE! WATCH OUT FOR GOLFERS RILED UP BY GARDENING IDEAS

Playing 18 holes and planting flowers are a lot like oil and water, I've discovered this week. See. I'm not to old to learn.

In my opinion, there are plenty of golfers. And, goodness knows, there are enough gardeners too. What we don't have enough of is gardener-golfers. Like me.

I found this out after last week's column. Overcome by the beauty of azaleas and dogwoods and verdant lawns, I committed the golfer's cardinal sin: I let on that there may be something better than golf.

Boy, serious golfers can get pretty vicious when they read something like that. I had no idea how much emotional pain and suffering I could cause with a few innocent words.

"You're no golfer at all," one fellow yelled -- yes, bordering on a scream -- at me during lunch earlier this week. And he hasn't even seen me play.

Here's what I did. Last week I was all caught up in planting flowers around our house. So I wrote about it. I went so far as to suggest that the county park around the Common Pleas Courthouse in downtown Cape Girardeau might make a better botanical garden than a championship golf course, which I have been promoting now for nearly a year.

I like golf. But some of my golfing partners have confessed to being distracted when I take more interest in the flowers planted around the tee boxes than hitting a long, straight drive. And I'm always finding interesting wildflowers at golf courses. These wildflowers, of course, do not grow in the well-tended fairways or around the greens. They grow in the woods and brushy areas, where I happen to spend a lot of time when I am golfing.

It just so happens I think there is more to golf than low scores and well-executed shots. While you're out in the fresh air, why not notice the trees and shrubs, the lush grass and, yes, the flowers that most golf courses use as decoration? I'd hate to think the management of any golf course was wasting its money on landscaping, but a lot of golfers I know limit their botanical interests to whether or not the fairways have sprinkler systems and how well the greens are tended.

In short, there aren't enough golfer-gardeners.

This dates back a ways. I'm pretty sure the deep divide between golfers and gardeners occurred in the Garden of Eden. If God had gone ahead with his plans for an 18-hole course -- before his six busy days were up -- I'm fairly certain that old serpent would have been more interested in getting Adam out bright and early on the seventh day instead of pushing Eve to taste the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

But not even God can build a first-rate golf course in six days, so he put those plans on hold and created every living thing, including spiders and wasps, which I'm sure he had second thoughts about once the world got going.

Eve clearly was inclined to gardening, if I'm reading Genesis right. She kept hanging around the orchard where the snakes slithered around in the tall, unmowed grass. I'm pretty sure she had some flower beds and ornamental shrubs around the fruit trees, but I can't be certain, of course. I blame this on the fact that the compilers of the Bible were -- you guessed it -- golfers who were still smarting from the fact that the golf course didn't get built first, or at least before the fishes of the deep.

They were so resentful -- keep in mind this is pure speculation on my part -- that they found a way to blame the fall of man on gardening by putting all the focus on an apple, of all things.

If the golfers had had their way, the Bible would have started, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and a Robert Trent Jones golf course." Of course, God would have had to create Robert Trent Jones even before Adam, but that would have been OK with most of the golfers I know.

If you don't believe what I'm telling you, consider this: Where on Earth can you see example after example of man's efforts to recreate a little bit of the Garden of Eden?

Yep. You're right.

Golf courses.

And most golfers rarely notice the beauty around them. They are focusing on a small, white ball hundreds of feet in the distance.

I'm sorry folks. My old eyes can't see that far, even with the help of trifocals.

But I can see a patch of sweet William under the trees along the fairway.

Maybe God knew what he was doing after all.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.