Arnold Palmer looked out across the rolling Lake Elmo landscape Thursday, squinting at the sculpted dirt and mud of what will become the final hole at a new golf course with his name on it.

Then he looked down at the yardage sheet of the now-emerging Royal Golf Club. The course, located on the former site of 3M-owned Tartan Park Golf Course, is being redesigned in a collaboration between Palmer and golf great Annika Sorenstam. The pair toured the grounds Thursday.

“504 yards?” Palmer asked. The query was met with nods.

The golf icon squinted again, imagining, it seemed, how the hole might play. Then again at the yardage sheet.

“Par 4?” More nods. Another squint from Arnie.

“Why do we have a 504-yard par 4?” asked the man with 62 PGA Tour victories to his name.

Chuckles.

“You’ve gotta push some of these longer hitters these days,” said Thad Layton, a senior golf course architect who has worked for Palmer and his namesake design company for two decades.

Palmer chuckled. Then nodded.

And so it was that a living legend of golf — and of golf course design — signed off on the 18th at the Royal.

The course could open as early as June as a public, 18-hole course, practice area, restaurant and lighted par 3 course. The collaboration between Arnold Palmer Design Co. and Annika Course Design is being billed as a “king and queen of golf” project. It will be Sorenstam’s first American course.

Golf great Annika Sorenstam and her son, Will, 5, greet golf icon Arnold Palmer outside the clubhouse of Royal Golf Club in Lake Elmo Thursday. Scheduled to open as soon as June 2017, the former Tartan Park Golf Course is being redesigned by the firms of Palmer and Sorenstam. (Pioneer Press: Dave Orrick)

Hollis Cavner, who runs several professional golf events, including this week’s 3M Championship at TPC Twin Cities in Blaine, purchased the Lake Elmo property from 3M Co. in March for $5 million. Some 310 homes are planned along the edges of the 477-acre parcel, Cavner said, noting that the density of homes has decreased as he has worked with city officials on construction plans.

At 86, Palmer no longer leads Arnie’s Army down fairways with a kick in his stride, as he did for decades on courses that ranged from Augusta to Keller. Visibly leaner than he has been for much of his later life, he was accompanied by a nurse Thursday, and he remained seated in a golf cart for most of his tour of the course.

But he was engaged in details of the design, asking Layton, Cavner and a small team of course workers about the heather and fescue that will encroach on the fairways, the locations of several sand traps, and the beguiling length that has come to mark modern courses. (The Royal track will play at 7,167 yards from the back tees, or shorter than 4,000 yards from the front tees; it’s designed to be “fun,” Layton said.)

“We wanted to create a spectacle, something that this community would be very proud of,” Palmer said Thursday.

Palmer and Cavner previously teamed up to create TPC Twin Cities, one of the area’s marquee courses that Palmer designed from what was essentially featureless cornfields. Cavner said he approached Palmer more than a decade ago about the Lake Elmo course, but the Great Recession put the project in stasis.

“Arnie kept asking me, ‘Is that Tartan thing gonna happen?’ ” Cavner said. Then 3M, which used the land as a resort for 3M employees and clients, contacted Cavner earlier this year. Palmer said Thursday he was excited about the speed of the project — and in the same breath ribbed his local accomplice.

“This is a great thrill for me and because we did start talking about this some time ago,” Palmer told a gathering of course officials and local dignitaries at a luncheon inside the clubhouse, which will be renovated by Lake Elmo-based Retail Construction Services. “This isn’t gonna take 10 years. This is gonna take a couple of years to make things happen, and they’ll start happening quickly now that … I’ve stopped Hollis from talking.”

Palmer closed with some advice for those who will play the course: “Keep in mind that it’s a game, and play it like a game — with friends and enjoy yourselves.”