John Woodruff spent six years building an oasis. He made it without blueprints but had a vision of a water-filled oasis with plants and trees of all varieties, fish, and a mini-golf course carved through solid canyon walls eons ago. We hear about his remarkable journey, learn about how he uses water, and we even learn about the mini-golf craze of 1931.
Thanks again to John for joining us. Learn more about his place here. Below are some behind-the-scenes pictures of his new 18 holes course which he is currently building and is a few years away from opening.
Transcript
Robert Osborne:
One evening, I convinced my wife and one of my teenagers to come with me. From the road, there was one little song that just said Oasis Ranch. Big concrete walls and vegetation hid what was inside. What we discovered blew us away.
Robert Osborne:
Welcome to The Outfall, where we share the backstories about our water world. This is Robert. Some stories here we seek out months in advance, while others just arrive, already gift wrapped, ready to be opened. This one is the latter. What we discovered inside those walls was not a Myrtle Beach-style putt-putt course filled with fake blue water, volcanoes and other gimmicks. No, this was a water-filled oasis with plants and trees of all varieties, fish, a turtle, and a course that seemed like it was carved through solid canyon walls eons ago. After playing, I had so many questions, so I grabbed my handheld recorder and tracked down the owner.
John Woodruff:
I’m John Woodruff, and I’m the owner-operator of the Oasis Ranch Mini Golf.
Robert Osborne:
Now, how would you describe your course to someone?
John Woodruff:
It’s a botanical garden with some golf in there.
Robert Osborne:
John Woodruff is an affable, down-to-earth guy, one of those guys that can talk to anyone with ease. We found a quiet place and I hit record not knowing what I’d uncover. What he shared was a six-year journey in passion, patience, and perseverance. I think y’all will enjoy it. And yes, water is central to this story.
John Woodruff:
I grew up in Clemson and my dad was professor there. I went to Clemson and studied landscape design and horticulture. I owned and operated a landscape construction company for about 35 years and built everyone else’s dream backyard with the waterfalls and the ponds. About 2014, I decided that I was getting old and I needed to start working on my dream landscape, so I looked around for some property and found this place, which is very close to my house, within golf cart distance, and drew out what I thought I wanted on an aerial photograph and got some heavy equipment to rough it in. Then my crew and I started right out front here, and just day after day, week after week, year after year, just kept going until it looked the way I wanted it to look.
Robert Osborne:
How long was that?
John Woodruff:
Six years on the course.
Robert Osborne:
Do you remember the first day, when you first started?
John Woodruff:
I do. I started digging out the big pond, I wanted a pond, a big pond.
Robert Osborne:
[crosstalk 00:02:56].
John Woodruff:
I had a heavy equipment in. I just love water. I’ve built waterfalls and played in the creek when I was little and made dams. I’ve just always loved playing and controlling water, so I made a pond and the waterfalls. That’s a big part of it for me, is the water garden part of it.
Robert Osborne:
Well, and that’s one thing that impressed me here, because you usually maybe you’ll have one little water feature, but water just is throughout.
John Woodruff:
It’s everywhere. It’s the oasis, that’s the idea, that’s the water. As I was building, my whole idea was that this water has been coming out over the bedrock, a big monadnock or whatever was here before, and has carved its way down through the bedrock. All those arches and tunnels and curves and things are where the water has run in the past and carved its way down. Now, we play golf down through the old river beds and around the edges of the lagoons that are there now. A lot of people, once I explain that it’s a water-worn landscape, they go, “Oh, I get it now.” Before it was, “What’s that arch and why is there a tunnel?”
Robert Osborne:
Right, right.
John Woodruff:
But when you see what I was envisioning or know what I was, it kind of makes more sense I think.
Robert Osborne:
Did you work your way up, is that how that-
John Woodruff:
We worked all the way around and then vertically up. I wanted a lot of vertical height in the thing so you feel like you’re down in the oasis. A lot of it is spontaneous creation. We would just start bending the rebar and I’d stand back and look and then we’d go to lunch. When I’d come back, they’d go, “What are we going to change?” Because at lunch, I’d think about what I had and what I wanted it to look like. And about 5,000 pictures a week so I could document and look at what I was doing along the way.
Robert Osborne:
Really? Wow.
John Woodruff:
Which have come in handy when I need to know exactly where that pipe ran under that rock, I can look back at an old photograph and oh, that’s where our plumbing ran.
Robert Osborne:
Did you anticipate it taking six years or more?
John Woodruff:
Oh no.
Robert Osborne:
What was going through your head at that point?
John Woodruff:
I thought, oh, we’ll just knock this out, put in. I kind of knew what I wanted and, oh, I was thinking maximum two years. We got the end of two years and we were still out there in the mud, working on drainage. Oh, underground is another whole world there. There’s drainage and irrigation and electricity and communication, and there’s all of that underground. First, we’re getting the big trees in because it takes heavy equipment to get in there and plant the big trees, and the giant boulders and large things had to be brought in first and placed pretty much where I thought they would be. Then everything formed around it. If a tree got offset by three feet, that was okay, just everything shifted three feet and we had three more feet on the other side to work with. It was definitely spontaneous creation. It’s just whatever it felt like that day, that’s what we built.
Robert Osborne:
If it was me, I’d have some low points, like, what am I doing here? Did you ever-
John Woodruff:
I don’t think so. I jumped out of bed every morning and ran down here. You can make anything you want, that’s what … I always had to create things. I’m an artist and a creator of things, so it was just heaven for me.
Robert Osborne:
Wow.
John Woodruff:
As we were building it, people said, “Well, why don’t you just hurry up and finish it?” I was like, “Okay, imagine this. I’m building an airplane and you’re going to fly in it. One of my wings isn’t quite finished and some of the windows aren’t in yet. Should I just go ahead and open?” and, “Oh, no.” I couldn’t open until it was there. Everything worked together and everything came together at the end, but we’re not taking off early because we can’t fly until it’s all there.
Robert Osborne:
What have you learned through the years with dealing with water?
John Woodruff:
It wants to get out of wherever you want it to be, whether evaporating or leaking out or splashing out. Water does not like to stay where you put it, you’ve got to make it happy. Every water feature is totally different. It’s like a creature. Once it comes alive and you plug it in and it’s running, then you see where it’s throwing water out or you see what’s going on and you tune it. We call it tuning the waterfall. Once the water is coming out over the front, you add a rock or you take away and you tune it to look and be balanced the way you want it to look.
Robert Osborne:
That’s right.
John Woodruff:
We go back through the waterfalls continuously and as algae grows or things come in, we’ll tune it a little bit to make it look the way it’s supposed to.
Robert Osborne:
I noticed you had koi in there. Were you always going to have?
John Woodruff:
I’ve always had koi. I’ve got little ponds in my backyard and things, and I’ve always raised koi, both for my clients or traded with clients.
Robert Osborne:
Really?
John Woodruff:
That was one of the things I knew I wanted in here, was someplace for my koi to have a nice big pond.
Robert Osborne:
It’s huge.
John Woodruff:
Because the more you feed them, the more they grow, and people feed them all day long out there.
Robert Osborne:
Anything you have to do as far as water quality or what are you doing?
John Woodruff:
I’ve got a giant gravel bed built into the main lagoon out there, and all of my water gets pulled through that gravel bed and it has beneficial bacteria and just the process of being filtered through gravel. That pretty much takes care of most of my water quality needs. I do a lot of planting in the water, which pulls my nitrates out of there and keeps the algae from having fertilizer to grow it. But I try to rely 90% on just that big gravel filter. They build swimming pools that way now. They’ll build a swimming pool and have a gravel filter bed next and all the water.
Robert Osborne:
So you had done this before then?
John Woodruff:
Not done it, but just read about it enough to know that that’s the way it needed to be. I always had heavy gravel in the bottoms of my ponds because that’s where the digestion happens. Then I started pulling the water down through that gravel. Then, through reading and looking on the internet, I saw the idea of a skimmer bed. It’s a big, totally separate bed of gravel, but the water skims out of the main pond and down through that gravel before it goes back to the pump.
Robert Osborne:
How many gallons, do you know?
John Woodruff:
I have 60,000 in the main lagoon and about 7,000 in the smaller pond here.
Robert Osborne:
Do you have to kind of keep [inaudible 00:09:39] with evaporation?
John Woodruff:
Oh, it’s continuous addition of water. I had a well dug out back here and I put a solar pump down in the bottom with a solar panel. It doesn’t pump much, but it’s a continuous pump out of the ground so I can continuously feed. Then Seneca Water and Light really likes me because I pump a lot of their water in, but when I do that, I have to remove the chlorine.
Robert Osborne:
So it’s an either, or. You’re either pumping from the well, and if it’s not enough then-
John Woodruff:
Then I supplement with … Because on a 90-degree day with all these waterfalls splashing, it’s just a big evaporator.
Robert Osborne:
How many gallons do you think you lose? [crosstalk 00:10:17]?
John Woodruff:
Oh, we add at least 300 to 400 gallons in the big pond every day, and out front here, we’ll add a couple of hundred gallons.
Robert Osborne:
Wow. That’s neat. I think most folks don’t realize that, right?
John Woodruff:
Oh yeah. I’ve had clients that said, “Oh, my pond is leaking,” and I said, “Well, how much are you losing?” “Oh, 10, 20 gallons a day,” and I said, “Well, you’ve got a big waterfall. If you stand there with a squirt bottle and keep those rocks wet, you’re going to use up 10 gallons of water.” It takes a while for people to understand that the water wants to get out and it’s going to find a way out.
Robert Osborne:
Before we talk about his golf course, let’s just take a short break. Do you know where mini golf started and how big it got? I had no clue, but I read John Margolis’s book, titled Miniature Golf, this past weekend. Let me share a little bit what I learned. Mini golf was homegrown here in the South. It was born in the late 1920s, before the Depression, in a resort on top of Lookout Mountain on the border of Georgia and Tennessee. It immediately just blew up across the country. In 1930, there were 50,000 miniature golf courses throughout the country, played by an estimated four million people. Crazy. The New York Times reported that mini golf was replacing movies as the nation’s fifth largest industry. Box office receipts reportedly were down 25% during mini golf’s peak in 1930s. In fact, some studios such as Warner Brothers announced plans to build courses and convert unprofitable movie theaters into indoor courses. One year later, interest evaporated and courses disappeared, but only to resurface with the birth of suburbia.
Robert Osborne:
All right, I just had to share this with y’all. Let’s get back to John.
John Woodruff:
I knew I had to have 18 holes and I didn’t want dinky, small things. I wanted each hole to be its individual place. As you pass from hole one to hole two, there’s sort of a divider there, and once you get on the two, you don’t see three and you don’t see one. You’re playing that hole and there’s no one else there in that area with you. Then you move to another stage. I called them stages, so you’d move from stage to stage. It’s like scenes in a movie or chapters in a book and you move through and it builds. At the beginning, there’s really no water and it’s pretty tight and you start playing through, but the farther into the course you get, you start encountering the creek, waterfalls and then bridges. By the time you’re around to the end of the course, you’re going behind the big waterfall. It builds and builds and builds so you’re not let down at the end. You’ve climaxed with visual stimulation by the end there.
Robert Osborne:
What are some of the comments that you’ve heard as you walk around the course? Things that just-
John Woodruff:
I love hearing what people say when they’re not in front of me going, “Oh, your landscape is so awesome and we really love it and you’re la, la, la.” I like to hear what they say to each other. I’ve walked through the course, picking up trash and just out there all the time, and I hear people going, “Look at that. Whoa. Jim, Jim, come here, come here.” That’s when I know that they really love it because they’re telling each other, “Come look at this. You’re not going to believe this.” That’s my real reward, is that people see what I put out there and they’re getting pleasure from it.
Robert Osborne:
That’s awesome.
John Woodruff:
If you see me walking through the course, ignore me and just say nice things.
Robert Osborne:
Big shout out to John for sharing his story with us. Please make sure to check out the show notes, to see some pictures of his oasis. We’ve even included a few behind-the-scenes pictures of his new 18-holes course, which he’s currently building and as a few years from opening. I love his spontaneous creativity without blueprints and that passion that drove him for six years. If you’re driving through Clemson, make sure you visit his personal oasis. Let us know, we may even join you for a game.
Robert Osborne:
Thanks again for listening to The Outfall and sharing your comments with us. If you enjoy our podcast, please help us and share the podcast with a friend. We’ll see you next time.
