Ditches, Lanes, Copses,, and Hedgerows 63 



are the best to use. It is a good plan to buy some 

 very small seedling Hollies, and let them get strong 

 in a nursery, so as to be able to get a few when 

 mending or making fences. The more ordinary 

 materials, too, with an occasional Holly intermixed, 

 give very efficient shelter indeed. The Ivy runs 

 through such fences and makes them very pretty, 

 tying them together with its graceful lace work, and 

 its growth seldom chokes the Quick or other plants. 



The Fence Beautiful. 



So far this about the true British fence is to lead 

 to what I want to emphasise — that the best and safest 

 live fence may be beautiful as well as enduring and 

 effective. If my reader will go so far as to form the 

 right fence, then he has it in his power to make 

 a very beautiful one, and to prove that use and beauty 

 are one even in a fence. Wild rough fences in many 

 countries are often pretty with Ivy, Clematis, Thorn, 

 Fern, wild Rose, Honeysuckle, Brier and Sloe, but 

 the trim clipped fence made of one sort of bush or 

 tree only is stupidly ugly. We may make fences 

 for miles, for ever beautiful yet always varied as one 

 goes along. But to do this one must never deviate 

 from the best fencing plants as a centre to the 

 fence— Quick, Holly, and Cockspur Thorn, and while 

 keeping to this central idea of the resisting and 

 enduring bushes, add what beauty we can, and that 

 is much! And as this is the Wild Garden its main 



