"Hedges," Plains Folk #534 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

Traveling the northern plains this summer, scenting the lilacs in the roadside shelterbelts, reminds me of other plains places where tree-planting has shaped the landscape and life. I think of a conversation years ago with my cousin Bernice, when she told one of the side effects in Kansas of the shelterbelt projects of the 1930s. Native plum were planted as an under-story of the multi-row belts, and after that, Bernice and Aunt Emma ceased gathering sandhill plums and instead picked "shelterbelt plums" for jelly.

I think of the Mennonite localities of my native state, too, where Osage-orange hedge-rows remain better preserved than elsewhere. Osage orange, although introduced for use as a living fence, a true hedge, remained after the advent of barbed wire as a shelterbelt species and a source of fenceposts.

I recall time spent in Conquest, Saskatchewan, the shelterbelt capital of Canada, where caragana hedges impose on the prairie landscape an English sense of the enclosed garden.

Most of all, though, I think of the Canterbury plains of New Zealand. These plains, more than any other in the world, have been Anglicized, the new world patterned after the old, through the planting of hedges.

The Canterbury plains were settled in the 1850s and 1860s, the same time as, say, eastern Kansas. That was before barbed wire. The Canterbury pilgrims solved the fence problem by introducing the hedge plant called gorse, or furz.

Gorse is a nasty plant. Its branches are tough and dense and covered with needle-like leaves that tear the skin. Cattle might breach it, but not sheep, and sheep are the staple of Canterbury. Leguminous, the shrub thrives even in thin soil.

Following English custom, the Canterbury settlers used gorse in what were called ditch-and-bank fences, a type used to a limited extent in states like Indiana and Illinois, but largely unknown in North America. To build such a fence, you began by digging a ditch perhaps two feet deep and as many wide, mounding the dirt on the outside bank. Atop the bank you planted a thick row of gorse, from seed. On this row, as a temporary barrier until the gorse filled in, you erected a smooth-wire fence.

Gorse has a habit of escaping into paddocks and fields and becoming a noxious weed. Its beautiful, yellow flowers give way to plump pods which, ripening in warm weather, burst and scatter the seed. As you walk along a gorse hedge, you can hear the seedpods popping. In England and Europe gorse is no problem, because insects keep it under control, but the control insects were not introduced to New Zealand.

The more serious problem with gorse hedges is that they are labor-intensive. They have to be trimmed every year to keep them dense and confine them. That's a story for another column.

In the meantime I'll continue to smell the lilacs, and pick the plums, and recall the charming, cockeyed grids sketched in gorse on the level fields of the Canterbury plains.

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