Here’s something: hurdles. Willow or hazel. Kindof woven fences. They’re beautiful.

Beautiful and I like them. I’ve used them many times, most often when I was a demon landscaper – actually for many years, in Pembs, in that proverbial ‘former life’ – when I was equally hopeless at sucking a meaningful living out of the earth.

They’re soft, and yet not, being literally but somehow pleasingly coarsely woven from either willow rods or cut hazel. You can buy them at fixed sizes – 6′ x 3′, maybe for hosting borders, or 6′ x 6′ if you need a standard boundary – or you can pay an extra lump and get them custom-made.

But hey they’re not standard. They’re stand-out. Cousins in General Aesthetic Improvement. The one stiffish and redoubtable (but still homely), and the other slicker and speaking more of damp and fluency and slickness.

Willow rods or withys/withies get soaked for aeons after cutting – something to do with tannins and also to extend their suppleness – and they’re often reddish-brown, drying when installed to brown/grey. Coz I’m an extravagantly gifted artiste (as you know), I worked out early doors that you can curve your structures: we made some groooovetastic garden dividers and shapers and sexy-border-backers by gently arcing hurdles. You can do it by simply driving in wooden posts and easing the hurdles into shape.

If you’re not thrillingly sculpturally-inclined like myself, you can bang em in straight: they still look great. You just need bog standard 3 or 4 inch round posts – two or three to a hurdle, depending on size and exposure to wind – a post rammer, and some wire or tie. That’s it. I’m but gobsmacked so few people use them to mark their boundaries or tart up their gardens, given their immediate and obvious wow factor.

They’re not even that expensive. Hazel hurdles, which are heavier-gauge and more robust than the willow, came to me yesterday for £80 each, all-in – so including delivery from Zummerzet (I believe. Or was it?) These were six-footers. Strong and striking and bloody good value: I put them up in less than two hours. Willow equivalents *are more*, possibly £130 a pop. But still worth it.

In that former life I was sad or fascinated enough to visit both the National Willow Collection (Long Ashton, near Brizzle) and to actively consider growing willows. I even had preliminary chinwags about using some of the National Botanic Garden for Wales’s land, to produce them. (Weirdofact no. 827: our landscaping mob did a significant bundle of work up there). I got on well with Wolfgang Bopp, then the Top Man, who was interested – liked the idea. I also tried to persuade my next-door neighbour, Robbie the Inflammable Farmer, to lease me coupla fields: neither plan came to fruition.

I just liked them – the hurdles, I mean. And the garden features and even the basketry-stuff, woven from willow. It seemed a lovely ‘cottagey’, crafty, skilful, righteous way to invest your time. But there were and are negatives.

The trips to Long Ashton and to willow growers, in Somerset, was *revealing*. I watched guys building hurdles on a ver-ry simple frame, and thought ‘blimey, we could do this’. (‘But you’d have to knock ’em out quickish, to make it at all worth your while’). I learned that (shockingly) the willows were sprayed twice weekly, in season, to knock out competing plants and munching critters. And that despite the fabulous and rich diaspora of willow species, almost the entire growing universe was down to two species of salix – maybeee even one. (It was thirty years ago but guessing the Drive Towards Progress may not have civilised this ‘culture’).

This genuinely appalled me. I thought of all the crafty people – o-kaaay, there aren’t that many but they would be exactly the type of person to be Rilly Appalled if they knew their withies had been repeatedly drenched in chemicals – and baulked. Or stalled. When it became obvious that we as a family (and a mob) couldn’t justify the likely indulgence of doing something in this apparently largely disappointingly perverse industry, and couldn’t get the land without battling scarily hard, we swerved the idea.

Wanted to use willows/grow willows. Wanted to do it organically, despite the advice and practice or state of the trade. Was gutted, in fact, that despite the seemingly wonderful tradition for family farming down there in Somerset, the reality was relatively ethically-barren, certainly in terms of chemical use and monoculture.

But hey. Bought some hazel hurdles (to replace willow) and banged them up and they look great.

Final thought: I’m aware that many of those who’ve considered investing in hurdles have been dissuaded ‘because they don’t last’. It’s true this can be at issue. But factoid no. 8 zillion and 82: ours (in a maritime location, in West Wales) lasted a decade. Why? Because we grew or transplanted bog-standard ivy against them. The ivy keeps them going – holds them – and it’s a nicer way than slopping loads of wood-preserver all over the landscape; that being the other alternative.

Hazel is a lovely beast. Yellowish and grey and soft and nutty. With added witches and buccolic wotnots. Willows are beautiful; whether weeping or just producing those erectile functions (rods) year after year, upon that cruel-but-horny autumn prune. Go out and feel them. Feel them. Or get them in your garden.