A Hedgelaying|hedge laid using pleaching|thumb Pleaching or plashing is a technique of interweaving living and dead branches through a hedge creating a fence, hedge, or lattices. Trees are planted in lines and the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens. Branches in close contact may grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation, a natural graft. Pleach also means weaving thin, whippy stems of trees forming a basketry effect.
A Hedgelaying|hedge laid using pleaching|thumb Pleaching or plashing is a technique of interweaving living and dead branches through a hedge creating a fence, hedge, or lattices. Trees are planted in lines and the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens. Branches in close contact may grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation, a natural graft. Pleach also means weaving thin, whippy stems of trees forming a basketry effect.
==History== An allée of pleached lime trees at [[Arley Hall in Cheshire, England|thumb]] Pleaching or plashing (an early synonym) was common in gardens from late medieval times to the early eighteenth century, to create shaded paths, or to create a living fence out of trees or shrubs. Commonly deciduous trees were used by planting them in lines. The canopy was pruned into flat planes with the lower branches removed leaving the stems below clear. The craft had been developed by European farmers who used it to make their hedge rows more secure. Julius Caesar (circa 60 B.C.) says that the Gallic tribe of Nervii used plashing to create defensive barriers against cavalry.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).