Pleaching

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Pleaching is the art of training trees into a raised hedge. Commonly, deciduous trees are planted in lines, then shaped to form a flat plane above the ground level. Branches are woven together and will grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation.

In medieval Europe, in areas where annual flooding endangered human settlements, the pleaching of inosculate trees was employed as a solution to what otherwise might have been an insolvable problem. The trees were planted on a grid, like a small orchard. As they grew, branches were pruned and trained along this grid, so that eventually, the branch of one tree met that of its neighbor. At that point, an incision was made in the bark of both branches and they were tied together, like blood brothers or sisters. The analogy is deserved because these branches would grow together to form one member, but their support activities (condition of water/minerals and sap) merged, thereby joining the life processes of the neighboring trees.

When these "pleached" branches had matured to form substantial limbs, connecting all the trees of the 'orchard', planks were thrown across where huts were built, eight or ten feet above the seasonal flooding level. Dense foliage grew out from the marginal trees, while those on the interior continued to draw water and minerals from the soil for the use of the collective, and also receiving sustenance from same. Then, of course, the exterior foliage served to shelter the huts from climatic excess, and perhaps to bear edible fruit.

Related tree shaping techniques, Espalier, topiary, arborsculpture.