Peeking Through Branches, Or Boards

WHEN I BUILT MY HOUSE, as we Americans like to say, although actually we pay other people to build them for us, the entire yard was a wasteland, a construction site, unimproved. You would think that the builder could at least have cleared away a few of the bigger boulders, but, no. Nothing but rocks and crabgrass. I almost bailed on closing day, it was so Martian. But I endured, and within a few years had a nice green yard with bushes and trees on the whole perimeter, making a sort of natural privacy fence, which my friend noted."This is so much like you", he said, as if he thought it amusing that someone would plant their yard in such a way as to create privacy, to shut out the world, to make a little isolated habitat. Looking around, it seems to me that building privacy is an American style, not for just me, but fore most of us. privacy fences everywhere, all brown. Trees and big shrubs along the property lines, open space within. I like it. What I would never do is build, or have built, a real privacy fence. The way my trees and big bushes have grown, you can indeed see in and out of the yard, by peeking through branches, but for the most part, its a wall of green in the growing season, and less so during winter. But to me, it seems so much better looking than a brown wooden wall, and I am glad I took the time to let it grow. A hedgerow just seems better looking than a privacy fence, but, alas, it takes more time, much more time, to create one, and hence, we suspect, the current profusion of brown wooden boxes across the fruited plain. Those of us who don't like them probably don't have much to worry about. They seem to deteriorate and fall down rather rapidly, within a few years, if left un-maintained, which they all seem to be. We green freaks can take comfort in knowing that our hedgerows will probably endure long after the privacy fences have crumbled into the earth and vanished.