FRUIT-TKEE FENCES. 263 



to be injured by frosts, where fogs and damp prevail ; 

 and also because the trees themselves soon become 

 mossy, and tend towards decay. In the case of cot- 

 tagers, where every inch of soil is of consequence, 

 it has been recommended that they should make 

 the fences of their gardens entirely of fruit-bearing 

 trees. Thus a writer on cottage husbandry remarks : 

 " In many parts of the country, all the plums, and 

 even all the apples and pears, which a cottager could 

 require for drink-making and cooking, might be grown 

 in his ring-fence ; by allowing the plants to attain their 

 natural height, and by trimming the sides of the fence 

 to the height of seven or eight feet, allowing the shoots 

 above that height to spread out either inwards only 

 or on both sides, according to the nature of the adjoin- 

 ing surface. We have seen such hedges in Worcester- 

 shire, and in different parts of the Netherlands and 

 Germany, thirty feet high, three feet wide at the bot- 

 tom, two feet wide at the height of eight feet, the space 

 between proving an impenetrable fence, and twenty 

 feet wide immediately above. Where, from the nature 

 of the soil or climate, neither the apple, pear, nor plum 

 will make hedges of this description, the sloe-thorn 

 may be employed, the fruit of which may be used for 

 all the purposes of the damson. In good soil, the sloe 

 will grow thirty feet high. The white-thorn should 

 never be planted as a fence to a cottage-garden when 

 the blackthorn can be got ; the latter forms as good 

 a fence, and has only one objection common to all the 

 genus Primus, that of being prolific in suckers ; these, of 

 course, the cottager must take care to remove. A sloe- 

 hedge once established, on the sheltered and warmest 

 sides of it different varieties of plums may be grafted ; 

 the more hardy kinds on the east and west aspects, 

 and the better kinds on the south side of the northern 

 boundary. A south wall, it is estimated, is equivalent 

 to the removal of the trees which are trained against 

 it, seven degrees further to the south ; if we take the 



