Caledonia Golf & Fish Club

Caledonia was Mike Strantz's first project on his own, opened in 1994 on a former rice plantation named for the Roman word for Scotland—Dr. Robert Nesbit's nod to his homeland. The approach alone is worth the green fee: a quarter-mile of 200-year-old live oaks, draped in Spanish moss, leading to an antebellum-style clubhouse with a porch that looks straight down the closing hole.

At a walkable par 70 and 6,526 yards, it's not a long test, but Strantz routed it through oaks and tidal marsh so thoroughly that Golfweek has called it "18 signature holes."

Under the live oaks

The oaks do half the work

Strantz routed the back nine through a working stand of live oaks and tidal marsh, and the trees aren't just scenery—the most famous is a single oak that guards the 7th green, forcing a different angle in depending on which side you attack from, the same way Augusta's Eisenhower Tree once did. Golfweek's "18 signature holes" line exists for a reason; there's rarely a flat, ordinary look at a green here.