Pleaching

[1] Trees are planted in lines, and the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens.

After the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the technique withdrew to the kitchen garden, and the word dropped out of English usage, until Sir Walter Scott reintroduced it for local colour, in The Fortunes of Nigel (1822).

[11] After the middle of the nineteenth century, English landowners were once again planting avenues, often shading the sweeping curves of a drive, but sometimes straight allées of pleached limes, as Rowland Egerton's at Arley Hall, Cheshire, which survive in splendidly controlled form.

A modern version of such free-standing pleached fruit trees is sometimes called a "Belgian fence": young fruit trees pruned to four or six wide Y-shaped crotches, in the candelabra-form espalier called a palmette verrier, are planted at close intervals, about two metres apart, and their branches are bound together to makes a diagonal lattice,[13] a regimen of severe seasonal pruning; lashing of young growth to straight sticks and binding the joints repeat the pattern.

[15] In the gardens of André Le Nôtre and his followers, pleaching kept the vistas of straight rides through woodland cleanly bordered.

Examples of living pleached structures include Richard Reames's red alder bench and Axel Erlandson's sycamore tower.