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- 
