i have seen a hedge beign cut and layed by my great friend Glyn Oníons. that is probably what paul means. If the trees in the hedge have grown up a bit, these were elms, you saw them half way though the trunk, maybe a bit more and pùsh them over in the line of the
fence away from the cut side of the trunk so they still have bark going up the trunk on one side though it is cut through on the other and so the tree will not die.
The layen trees will send up new branches going upward that you cut as you do any other hedge. There were plenty of elms in the hedge, they end up laying one on top of the other.
This system is used for hedges round feilds not round gardens.
Brenda Groth in the book Wuthering Heights they have a black currant hedge so two hundered years ago, give or take twenty to thirty years they used to have black current hedges. I suppose it was not a recent fashoin when the book was written so i can say two hundred years ago.
I have an architec cousin who seems to learn quite a lot about old fashioned house and garden styles, like, he says they used to use goat and cow hair, if i remember right, combed hair, in mud walls to strenghten them. About hedges he said that hedges around feilds used to have eighty types of trees in them. Could that be true, are their eight types of trees in Britian?
Plums are not too terribly prickly, it is not like the leaves of a juniper bush that are so prickly it is almost impossible to pick the berries iit is easy to find a way of picking th eplums without getting prickedthey have never pricked me though i have seen some good spikes growing out of the branches . Nor like gooseberrries, they have thorns but not too many.
A really good plum that makes the best jam in the world excepting blackurrant, is the damson, prunus isititia. I don't have it, one of my ambitions is to have one. agri
rose macaskie.