Garden Boundaries 



405 



all into a close, impenetrable, luxuriant mass. They 

 were, to use Wordsworth's phrase, " scarcely hedge- 

 rows, but lines of sportive woods run wild." In this 

 close green wall birds build their nests, and in their 

 shelter burrow wild hares, and there open Violets 

 and other firstlings of the spring. The twisted tree 

 trunks in these old hedges are sometimes three or four 

 feet in diameter one way, and but a foot or more the 

 other ; they were a shiftless field-border, as they took 

 up so much land, but they were sheep-proof. The 

 custom of making a dividing line by a row of bent 

 and polled trees still remains, even where the close, 

 tangled hedge-row has disappeared with the flocks 

 of sheep. 



These hedge-rows were an English fashion seen in 

 Hertfordshire and Suffolk. On commons and re- 

 claimed land they took the place of the quickset 

 hedges seen around richer farm lands. The bend- 

 ing and interlacing was called plashing ; the polling, 

 shrouding. English farmers and gardeners paid in- 

 finite attention to their hedges, both as a protection 

 to their fields and as a means of firewood. 



There is something very pleasant in the thought 

 that these English gentlemen who settled eastern 

 Long Island, the Gardiners, Sylvesters, Coxes, and 

 others, retained on their farm lands in the new world 

 the customs of their English homes, pleasanter still 

 to know that their descendants for centuries kept up 

 these homely farm fashions. The old hedge-rows 

 on Long Island are an historical record, a landmark 

 long may they linger. On some of the finest 

 estates on the island they have been carefully pre- 



