the great hedgerow (wall) of India

Most people know about the Great Wall of China, but how many have heard about the Great Hedge (wall) of India, careful built over many years to stop the smuggling of salt that hadn't been taxed?


Atlas Obscura article discusses this ultimately futile barrier. Here they discuss the difficulties in finding plants to make the hedge.

At first, the hedge was made mostly of dry branches lugged into place and piled high. But that proved a fruitless task, since it had to be replaced year after year. The line was divided into patrolled sections, and in some places the patrols started to plant and cultivate live hedge, with the idea of creating something more easily maintained and permanent.
Growing a live hedge wasn’t easy, though. The British tried using dwarf Indian plum trees, babool trees, prickly pear, thuer, bamboo, and many other local plants. In some arid places the trees just withered and died. Elsewhere, seedlings were swept away in floods. In other spots, the soil simply wasn’t rich enough to support the growth of anything beyond scrub.

read the whole thing.

it has since disappeared and the line was paved over as roads.

(Trumpieboy take note).

this video discusses.



Hedges are simple plants to form a fence, but a hedgerow is quite complicated, because it is interwoven.

I wasn't aware of this until I was listening to a John Bachelor podcast that discussed a book on the subject (no link: I downloaded it awhile back and can't find when it was posted).

But anyway, the difference between a hedge (line of plants) and a hedgerow is that the latter is interwoven to make a thick barrier.

often you cut down the tree so it would sprout and stay low, or cut it partway then bent it and interwove it to make the barrier.

and not just a barrier, but a source of food: a lot of the discussion was about using (and harvesting) hazelnut bushes in these hedgerows.

Here is an old film about making/repairing British hedgerows:




these barriers were quite thick and difficult to penetrate.

Which is why, when you read about the difficult World War II fights in "hedgerow country", it didn't mean just going through a thin line of bushes, but the barriers of thick hedgerows that made a  thick heavy barrier (eventually, they put plows on tanks to flatten them).