192 OLD-FASHIONED GARDENING 
increased; and finally it became necessary for each 
man to look after his own cattle instead of his neigh¬ 
bors’; to keep them within his own domain instead of 
allowing them to wander as they pleased—with his 
neighbor responsible for any harm they came to in his 
fields. So the last quarter of the eighteenth century 
saw pastures and fields generally inclosed with “bar¬ 
riers of wood or fences,” according to Brissot. And 
the day of the wilderness was over. Then came the 
growing admiration for it and the desire to “know no 
bounds”; and the area of the sunken fence—which is 
nothing but a ditch—arrived. 
A barrier between what a writer of 1801 calls the 
“family yard” and “farmyard intrusions,” which he 
highly recommended, was this ditch or sunken fence. 
It had come into popularity in England along with the 
craze for gardens au naturel, a fence, wall, hedge or 
any sort of boundary marking being much despised 
by the disciples of Nature untamed and unadorned. 
Planting was necessary, however, to conceal the line 
of even a “sunken fence”; so it was permissible to 
top it with a “low and light palisade” which, with the 
bank, was hidden from the house by rose trees planted 
on the inner slope of the ditch. The white rose was 
declared tallest and hardiest and handsomest for this, 
but the damask rose was a better choice because it 
yielded fine distilled water. 
