Page 15 - Brandon Sun - Your Home your Way (2019)

THURSDAY, MAY 9, 2019 • YOUR HOME YOUR WAY • THE BRANDON SUN 15

» Continued from Page 14 weaving twigs in opposite directions around
the posts. So, if you start one twig on the in-
The power of their snouts was impressive. side of a post, it then gets woven around the
The pigs root in search of tubers and other outside of the next post, the inside of the next
buried delights, and can make it look like a one, and so on. The next twig fed into the
mechanized tiller guided by a phantom got fence goes the opposite direction: outside of
loose overnight. post, inside, outside.
As it happened, one evening as I read It was quiet work. I cut and stripped
Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece “Anna Karenina,” branches pruned from olive and ash trees,
I paused halfway through one of his descrip- and listened to the water in a river running
tions of Russian country life. He depicted a far down along the valley bottom. The bells
countryside strung with wattle fences. of sheep and cows in far-off pastures twin-
What exactly IS a wattle fence? kled in the air; the wild shouts of herders
I had a vague notion, but needed to look were incomprehensible riddles that kept me
it up in a dictionary. It was a eureka moment: company. Sometimes, I paused in my slow,
A wattle fence is made of sticks driven into steady work to catch sight of a screeching
the ground and interwoven with twigs and bird rushing through the trees.
branches. I started my first fence in early March,
Then I did the next obvious thing: an and six weeks later I stood back and ad-
internet search. Sure enough, a few people mired my handiwork. Definitely, it had
out in the world were wattling, and happy to been a lot of work. But I was satisfied.
show how it is done on homemade videos. Aesthetically, it was pleasing in its in-
A wattle fence is simple. It’s made by exactness, rambling and irregular lines, its
pounding posts into the ground — say 12 woodiness.
inches deep — and then weaving twigs and I was happy to have used twigs and Writer Cain Burdeau weaves twigs and branches
branches in and out of the posts. At the very branches that otherwise would have been between posts to make a garden wattle fence on a
least, a twig needs to be woven around three burned, either in the wood stove or as property he lives on with his family in Contrada Pe-
posts so that it stays in place. bonfires. traro in the mountains of northern Sicily. In northern
The fence’s robustness — and it does Sicily, fences are essential to protect gardens against
become surprisingly robust — comes from » The Associated Press wild pigs. (The Associated Press)

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