27 November 2011

Word for the day: "pleaching"

From an article in The Telegraph:
The use of pleached trees to establish the architecture of a garden is one of the defining aspects of 17th and 18th-century design, particularly in France and Italy. Traditionally used to demarcate grand allées or to enclose intimate spaces, pleached trees had, until recently, fallen out of widespread use....

Pleaching is a style of growing trees in a line, usually straight, with the branches of the tree tied together and clipped to form a flat plane above the bare trunk. The branches are tied onto canes or wire to make tiers, and are then regularly pruned to keep their shape....

Planting a pleached hedge has been made much easier in recent years by the availability of ready-pleached trees. Imported mainly from Italy, these are trees whose branches have already started to be trained and are tied to a bamboo frame.... An imposing row of neatly clipped trees looks beautiful, but demands work... a team of three expert gardeners will spend a whole week, twice a year, maintaining a run of 50 trees.

1 comment:

  1. Can you have pleached peach trees?

    Sorry, couldn't resist. I'll just get my coat.

    ReplyDelete