Living Fences

I've been kind of obsessed with these living fences that we've seen throughout our trip.  They're basically just fence posts that are actually planted in the ground and that continue to grow while sitting there being fence posts.  The problem for normal fence posts is that they tend to go away after a while.  Wood posts rot or get eaten by termites, metal fence posts rust away and concrete posts last a long time, but are pretty expensive.  What a lot of people do here is use live fence posts which just keep growing and don't rot.  

It looks like most of them start out as a regular barbed-wire fences with conventional posts and are then supplemented with live fence posts.  They use different types of trees or shrub plants but I've seen what is apparently Gliricidia sepium which is pretty commonly used.  It has advantage for fences.  The sap doesn't rust or damage the barbed wire or nails, it's useful as foliage for livestock, produces good firewood and I think the best is that when you cut it back, it grows a bunch of new fence posts.  They start off by cutting some good length posts and just stabbing them in the ground and attaching the barbed-wire to them.  When they come back later, each fence post has sprouted about 5 or 6 new posts which get stabbed in and attached between the older ones.  These grow and so on.  If you didn't stop replanting them, you could end up with a very closely spaced fence that would be strong even years later when all your barbed wire was rusted away.  

This one above is pretty freshly pruned back and you can see that there are various thickness from newly sprouted posts to wise old ones.  

This one is really bushy and ready to be pruned, creating a bunch more posts.  

Here you can see what happens years later as the tree grows and surrounds the barbed-wire. Cool huh?   

These remind me of the living bridges that the Meghalaya of Northern India have been building (some for over 500 years!). The construction and maintenance of the bridges is passed down from generation to generation.  

Image not ours - I'm not sure who to attribute it to. 

 I love so many things about these fences.  The fact that they think ahead and plan for these strong fences in the future instead of just replacing the posts as they rot is great.  They have so many uses.  They also look pretty good.