Pleaching

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Pleaching is the art of training trees into a raised hedge or to form a quincunx. Commonly, deciduous trees are planted in lines, then shaped to form a flat plane above the ground level. Branches are woven together, their bark wounded at the joins and bound together. They will grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation, a process similar to grafting.


Contents

[edit] History

In late medieval gardens through to the early eighteenth century, shaded walks and pleached allées were a familiar feature in European gardens, though not much in the American colonies, where labor-intensive refinements have never been features of gardening: "Because of the time needed in caring for pleached allees," Donald Wyman noted,[1] they are but infrequently seen in American gardens, but are frequently observed in Europe."

After the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the technique withdrew to the kitchen garden, and the word dropped out of English usage, until Sir Walter Scott reintroduced it for local colour, in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822).[2] After the middle of the nineteenth century, English landowners were once again planting avenues, often shading the sweeping curves of a drive, but sometimes straight allées of pleached limes, as Rowland Egerton's at Arley Hall, Cheshire, which survive in splendidly controlled form.[3]

In Much Ado About Nothing, Antonio reports (I.ii.8ff) that the Prince and Count Claudio were "walking in a thick pleached alley in my orchard." A modern version of such free-standing pleached fruit trees is sometimes called a "Belgian fence": young fruit trees pruned to four or six wide Y-shaped crotches, in the candelabra-form espalier called a palmette verrier, are planted at close intervals, about two metres apart, and their branches are bound together to makes a diagonal lattice;[4] further pruning, lashing of young growth to sticks and binding the joints repeat the pattern.

Smooth-barked trees such as limewood or linden trees, or hornbeams were most often used. A sunken parterre surrounded on three sides by pleached allées of laburnum is a feature of the Queen's Garden, Kew, laid out in 1969 to complement the seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch architecture of Kew Palace.[5] A pleached hornbeam hedge about three meters high is a feature of the replanted town garden at Rubens House, Antwerp, recreated from Rubens' painting The Walk in the Garden and from seventeenth-century engravings.[6]

In the gardens of André Le Nôtre and his followers, pleaching kept the vistas of rides through woodland cleanly bordered. At Studley Royal, Yorkshire, the avenues began to be pleached once again, as an experiment in restoration, in 1972.[7]

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Wyman's Gardening Encyclopedia 1971: "Pleach".
  2. ^ The Fortunes of Nigel, ch. x, noted by Paul Roberts, 'Sir Walter Scott's Contributions to the English Vocabulary" PMLA 68.1 (March 1953, pp. 189-210) p 196.
  3. ^ Charles Foster, "The History of the Gardens at Arley Hall, Cheshire" Garden History 24.2 (Winter 1996), pp. 255-271. p 265 and 266:fig 10.
  4. ^ [[Eleanor Perenyi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (New York) 1981 pp 24-25.
  5. ^ Quarterly Newsletter (Garden History Society) No. 10 (Summer 1969), pp. 8-10.
  6. ^ Anne Kendal, "The Garden of Rubens House, Antwerp"Garden History 5.2 (Summer 1977, pp 27-29), p.28.
  7. ^ Ken Lemmon, "Restoration Work at Studley Royal" Garden History 1.1 (September 1972, pp. 22-23) p. 22.

[edit] References

  • Time-Life Encyclopedia of Gardening: Pruning and Grafting

[edit] External links

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