Boundaries, supports & structures

Walnuts Farm

I thought about writing my second book about these three things. I got so far as to buy lots of other books by ‘proper’ woodworkers, such as Ben Law, yes, he of Grand Designs, and to seriously research chainsaws. It may not end up being a book, it may be a blog post.

No, not a blog post, a love letter.

Because truly, it is boundaries that make the world go round.

I know, as a concept, boundaries are everywhere these days. But that is what attracted me to this triad of horticultural features is that they are also all psychological concepts too.

If it didn’t have connotations of disreputable men, I might also have involved scaffolding. I wrote my doctoral theses on the relationship between empathy and scaffolding in parents helping their children learn to read. I know; very niche.

Boundaries:

The line that marks, that separates, that divides, where one thing and another meet. It has been, in therapy-jargon, reduced to simply meaning the line that is crossed where I go from being approving of something to not allowing it. This seems a shame, because it means so many other more nuanced, interesting things.  

South Wood Farm, a design by Arne Maynard

I think of ‘beating the bounds’, where parishioners would ‘beat’ sticks on the parish boundaries, keeping alive the cultural memory of where the edges were, before such information became recorded on maps. I have a curtilage around my cottage, which is marked as historically significant in the listings of important properties in England; it is not just the building that is listed, it is the apron of land that surrounds it. Which means that it is not when I step in through my back door that I am home, it is when I turn down the track and come through our gate.

Boundaries have become terribly fashionable because they help one make sense of others, but they do this because we are very used to them making sense of space.

Imagine a garden. Any garden. It must have an edge because otherwise it is simply a landscape. Some gardens (see Dan Pearson for a good example of this, but also Arne Maynard) like their gardens to melt at the edges. They just soften, and become less manicured and curated as the move from the heart to the boundary, and then they just slowly transform into a field, or a woodland, or a hillside.

At the other end of the continuum? A walled garden. A secret garden, with a long, straight brick wall, and a secret gate. When you need refuge, there is simply nothing like a walled garden. Big, strong, protective boundaries.

The Pythouse Kitchen Garden. If you haven’t been, go…

Sadly, I was not blessed with a walled garden. I was blessed with a bit of a field, edged with some standard agricultural post and rail, one side facing the village (and all of the boundary pushing that occurs in an English village) and the other facing the sweeping winds that come off the Blackdowns.

I wanted a walled garden, so I planted some walls. I made walls out of hedges. Softer than brick, the native hedges wrap the whole field in an almost opaque embrace. I am not saying I ever would want to sunbathe naked in the orchard, but I want to have the opportunity to do so if the urge suddenly and inexplicably came upon me.

Inside the boundaries, what then? We all need structure, we all need support. Structure means the things that make our time, our space, our thinking from simply being random chaos. It can look like routine, or regularity, or the coffee you have in the morning, the celebration that you have on a Friday night, or clean sheet Sunday. It stops all the days merging into each other. It gives predictability and comfort.

So inside my planted walls, I have made sense of the space. I divided the orchard from the flower field with a row of espaliers. I edged the top beds with box which has, to date, survived the onslaught of blight and caterpillars. Around the perennial beds, a hand-woven fence of willow and chestnut.

A fence at Rolf’s Farm, photo by Jeska Deane

It is this fence that has completely collapsed. I adored making it – I fear I may have been in prison in a former life, I take so easily to willow weaving – but it has not endured. It is time to replace it, because without it the field feels, well, too much like a field and too little like a garden.

I initially thought I would have willow hurdles, but then I remembered I have more hazel than I do willow now. (The willow grew too well, what with us being in Somerset, and it took some digging out.) I thought I would learn how to make hazel hurdles, with sails (or ‘zales’) and spur rods, and twilley holes. But then I remembered that I have a job and two businesses, and I am physically able but unskilled in woodland crafts. Also, very solid hurdles would shade out anything on the north side of them, and that might include my Physocarpus collection.

Now, if anyone ever tells you that time spent just scrolling on Instagram is time wasted, then I have one token defence. I stumbled across the answer to my structural needs.

I give you, the hazel fence, by Robin Lucas.

I was really hoping to have made one of these today, and have it all photographed and shown off, but the leaves have yet to completely fall from my hazel, and I fear what might happen if I cut it before it is fully dormant. Probably what will happen is that I leave it too long, and they start to become covered in catkins.

But when I do get round to it, and making the gates that go with it, I can assure you that you will be the first to know.

Ditto if I do decide to traditionally publish a second book. I may have other plans…