Wattle Fences

I don’t know when I first learned about wattle fences, but I do know that I’ve wanted one from the very moment I heard of them. For those of you not in the know about various types of garden borders, 1) congratulations on having much cooler interests than me and 2) a wattle fences are made by weaving flexible branches around posts made from sturdier branches. Basically, you take branches that are wrist-width (ish) and put them upright in the ground, and then you take thin, whip like branches and weave them in and out. As you weave them, the whole thing becomes quite strong and sort of holds itself together. Traditionally this is done with willow branches, which is where my desire to have a wattle fence stopped. We don’t have a willow in our yard and the idea of sourcing one just so I could make a wattle fence seemed a little absurd.

Enter Forrest. His spring project this year was to clear out an area that had once been covered in a beautiful forsythia but had long been choked out by blackberries and ivy. We’d left it all up for a long time, probably longer than we should have, because it provided a really nice barrier between us and the road that goes along our house. But, enough was enough and if we were to have any hope of saving the forsythia, he needed to clear it out and salvage what he could.

And clear it out he did. After having a lot of fun with a chainsaw, we were left with a lot of dead blackberry canes and a fair amount of sickly looking forsythia. A friend of ours who just happens to be a master gardener advised us to do a lot of trimming, only leaving the strongest parts, in the hopes that without so much foliage to support. the forsythia can bounce back.

The upshot of all this is that Forrest found himself with a lot of vine-like branches. And I think you can imagine that I’ve mentioned the wattle fence to him more than a few times, so, while I took a bunch of tween girls for boba tea this Saturday, he took the initiative and surprised me. I returned home to half a fence and a very excited Forrest.

Not just him, either. Two of my girls got into the fun and it was eleven o’clock at night when I finally called them in to stop wattling and go to bed already. I guess there’s something rather meditative about the weaving process and they can’t seem to resist how magical and charming it makes the kid garden look.

It’s funny, isn’t it — I’m the one who wanted the fence, but in the end it was them that built it, who caught on to the excitement and who rightfully feel the satisfaction of a job well done. There’s a lot of things like that for me right now. I’ve been dealing with some moderately annoying health issues - nothing terminal, but just enough that I don’t exactly have “build a fence” energy right now. And as anyone who has had chronic health stuff knows, you try not to ask too much of the people around you because you never know when you might have a day where you need to ask a lot of them.

So I would never think of asking Forrest to do something like that, let alone my kids. But when I say that, when I say, “You didn’t have to do that for me,” they just laugh and smile and remind me that they didn’t. They did it because it’s cool and fun and yeah, maybe a little because if makes mom happy and who doesn’t want a few brownie points with mom? But it’s that in a life that can seem a little too online, there’s something wholesome about building something from nothing.

I get tired a lot these days. It’ll pass, I know, but I spend more time than I would like staring out the window, watching the bees flit from flower to flower and the most amazing part about it is that although I planted those flowers, I didn’t do it for them. I did it for me. But in the end, they’re the ones that love it most. I’m not really sure what that means, except maybe that we don’t get to decide what other people do for us. And sometimes the things we do for ourselves actually end up giving back more than we could have ever anticipated.