Artificial turf in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, built for salt air and shade.

Build around the shots you want to repeat.

A few useful putting lines close to the house can make regular practice easy. Discuss contours, cups and fringe after choosing the distances that matter to you. Select the roll and breaks for the practice you want to repeat.

On a golf- or lagoon-facing lot, keep the property boundary, water setback and walking access in the plan. A lawn or pet area can remain separate from the putting surface.

Check the zoning district and private requirements.

The Ponte Vedra Boulevard corridor includes properties within the county’s Ponte Vedra Zoning District, with its own yard and open-space rules. Confirm the parcel and intended work with county planning before using a general county limit to size the project.

In Sawgrass, Marsh Landing or The Plantation, obtain the current architectural instructions as well. Private review does not replace applicable public requirements. Bring the written conditions, tree information and any drainage concerns to the estimate.

Practice for greens Pete Dye built, in your own back yard.

TPC Sawgrass has been the permanent home of THE PLAYERS Championship since 1982, played every March on Pete Dye's Stadium Course, whose par-3 17th is the island green; Dye's Valley Course is its neighbor (Wikipedia: TPC Sawgrass). The PGA TOUR's world headquarters is in Ponte Vedra Beach, and so is the ATP Tour's.

The courses around it run just as deep. Sawgrass Country Club, member-owned and founded in 1974, hosted THE PLAYERS on its Ed Seay course from 1977 to 1981 (Wikipedia: Sawgrass Country Club). The Ponte Vedra Inn & Club, the 1928 resort that started the town, has Ocean and Lagoon courses reworked by Bobby Weed, and The Plantation plays 18 holes, par 72, over 7,141 yards.

A backyard green won't be the 17th, but it's where a short game gets its reps: real slope to read, a collar, and cups wherever you'd like them, on a layout designed for your yard, which you sign off before work starts. On golf-frontage lots the yard usually falls toward the course or a lagoon, and we build the base to use that fall.

Two approval paths: the zoning board on the boulevard, a private committee behind the gates.

Ponte Vedra Beach is unincorporated, with no city hall, but it has its own zoning district. The Ponte Vedra Zoning District Regulations, Ordinance 2020-38, are administered by the Ponte Vedra Zoning and Adjustment Board, which takes final action on building size, land-use intensity, and the yards and open space around buildings (Ponte Vedra Zoning District Regulations).

The zoning rules date to 1965, and the overlay for the coastal corridor to 1997. On the boulevard, where many older lots have no HOA in the usual sense, ask county planning whether your layout needs anything from the board before it's final.

The district's own Tree Protections rule, current as of a July 2025 update, applies to every existing, proposed or reconfigured residential lot in the district and prevails over Article IV of the county Land Development Code wherever the two conflict. A Protected Tree is any tree with a trunk of 10 inches DBH or more; a Specimen Tree, one of 30 inches DBH or more. Removing a Protected Tree needs Site Plan approval and a Protected Tree Removal Permit, which expires six months after it's issued. No replacement tree is required for one within 5 feet of the house footprint, a driveway of 800 square feet or less, or the perimeter fence line; near a pool, patio, sidewalk or similar improvement the replacement is inch-for-inch, and everywhere else it's two inches planted for every inch removed. An after-the-fact permit doubles the requirement, and a denial is appealed to the same Ponte Vedra Zoning and Adjustment Board (Ponte Vedra Zoning District Regulations, Section VIII.U). Clearing a mature oak to open up a green or a lawn usually lands in the two-inch tier, so plan the layout around the trees you want to keep and confirm the permit before any tree work starts.

Inside Sawgrass Players Club, Sawgrass Country Club, Marsh Landing and The Plantation, a private architectural committee approves changes instead, and the covenants still bind. Our guide explains what a committee can and can't stop.

In Marsh Landing, that committee is the Master Association's Architectural Review Board, and its own published rule is broad: an application is required of "all exterior modifications, including like-for-like replacements and tree removals" (Marsh Landing Master Association: Architectural Review). Replacing a worn lawn with turf, or clearing a tree for a green, needs an application first, judged against the ARB Green Book, 2024 Edition, and coordinated by the association's management company. Since February 2011 the ARB has also been a St. Johns County Registered Notice Association, which lets an owner get a county building permit without ARB-stamped plans by filing a signed affidavit that the ARB received the same application at least 30 days earlier and by accepting the civil-liability risk of violating the covenants. That's a county-permitting route for structures like a pool or pergola, not a substitute for the ARB's own decision on your turf or green.

Salt air, brackish wells and live-oak shade: three reasons grass gives out near the ocean.

Onshore salt spray burns St. Augustine and Zoysia along the Ponte Vedra Boulevard corridor, and irrigation drawn from shallow coastal wells can be brackish enough to make it worse. Turf takes neither.

Mature live oaks and cabbage palms shade much of the boulevard corridor and the older Sawgrass streets, and grass under them never gets the sun it needs. Turf needs none, and the canopy keeps its surface temperature well down in summer (what shade does for turf).

The sand has a past, too. The town began as Mineral City, a titanium and mineral-sands mining settlement after a 1914 discovery, and the National Lead Company renamed it Ponte Vedra in 1929 (Wikipedia).