"Hedge Trimming," Plains Folk #536 (Copyright Hoy & Isern)

Throughout much of England, gorse hedges for centuries provided fencing and charm to the landscape. The hedges had to be trimmed every year, but that was no problem in a traditional society with an available peasantry. Itinerant crews of hedge trimmers armed with gorse knives did the work on contract. (A gorse knife looks like a machete on the end of an ax-handle.)

Labor was scarce, though, on the North American frontier. The shortage of labor for trimming work was a big reason why Osage-orange hedge fencing was never much used on the plains.

They had the same problem on the Canterbury plains of New Zealand, where gorse hedges like those of England were almost universally used for bounding paddocks. There were some contract trimmers, but farm and station hands generally had to do the trimming themselves. They enjoyed working with thorny gorse about as much as American cowboys liked barbed wire.

By the turn of the century there were rotary gorse cutters driven from ground wheels, but it was not until the 1950s that tractor-mounted hedge trimmers eliminated the nasty hand labor. In Canterbury I met several fellows who once did custom trimming--one even had an old English gorse knife. Over the past forty years, though, sheep farmers have been replacing gorse hedges with tight fences of seven smooth wires.

That's why I'm glad I found Alister Wooding, from the Geraldine hill country. He and his brother Warwick are the hedge trimming kings of New Zealand. And a couple of the handiest guys you could ever meet.

It was hard to keep Alister stationary long enough to record an interview (although we did it). He wanted to show off his equipment, all constructed in the Wooding farm shop. He has one machine for gorse and two others for trimming poplar and Monterrey pine, which are heavily planted in Canterbury as shelterbelts. (Canterbury has chilling southerlies in winter, desiccating Nor'westers in summer.)

The Wooding trimmers are built on truck chassis. Rotary blades, six or eight feet in diameter, are adjustable so as to spin vertically for cutting the side of the hedge, then elevate into horizontal position for cutting the top--maybe twenty feet off the ground for poplar. Octopi of hydraulic hose, these machines look like they belong in a Star Wars movie, not a sheep paddock. They also do fifty miles per hour on the highway.

Alister gave a crooked grin when I asked to see if he still had all his fingers. "You have lethal machinery, but if you respect it," he says, "it will respect you. There have been some very close shaves in the past." The most hazardous thing, he says, "is the sticks that flick out"--thrown from the blades at such velocity you can't even see them coming.

What about animals--don't they take fright? Evidently sheep and cattle don't pay much attention to the machinery, but horses "get a bit upset." Alister thinks that's because the tips of the blades move at the speed of sound, making a sound audible to horses and not to the other species.

While Alister buzzed some hedges for us, we stayed out of reach of flying sticks (except when I crept up for a few photos). We went away impressed with his pride in his craft. He cuts hundreds of miles of hedge every year and looks back on them with satisfaction--"making a nice neat job" is what he calls it. I have the feeling that when he and the few remaining gorse trimmers quit the business, the gorse hedges of Canterbury will be history.

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