only have been black spruce — were often of a size that was very suited for use as fencing ’poles’.491 Both cedar and black spruce, occurring frequently as they did on ’vacant’ or ’unoccupied’ land, were readily available, if needed, for use in the fences of local farmers, and I expect they could also have been harvested (whether legally or illegally) for sale to others, though further research is required on the extent to which there may have been the movement of fencing materials, especially of cedar, from areas on the island where it was abundant to areas where it was in demand. And it may be that the building of the railway on the island in the 18705 would have facilitated the transport of such materials to more distant parts. Hedges as field boundaries — Virtually every one of the new immigrants to Prince Edward Island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came from countries in the British Isles where a type of field boundary was commonly used that dispensed altogether with the collecting of wood: this was of course the use of living shrub and tree species to form stock-proof hedges, the techniques for the construction and maintenance of which, had developed by trial and error over more than a millennium.492 However, the use of hedges for field boundaries never caught on to any great extent in the New World, probably because of the availability of a ready supply of suitable fencing wood. Even so, there is some reference to hedges as field boundaries in the early island literature. During the pioneer period, two recorders from the British lsles were surprised to see that there were few if any hedges on the island. In 1822 Walter Johnstone could find only one ’thorn hedge’ he of British hawthorn) on the whole island, and that, ‘9‘ Land Commission 1875: the following witnesses associate fence ‘poles' with barren or otherwise poor land: Donald Campbell, Lot 16: “There is vacant land at the head of the South West River. A great deal of it is barren There is a strip of fence poles through the middle"; John Cocheran, Lot 7: “There is some [wilderness land] upon which there is a larger growth of wood, such as fence poles and scantling, but still it is low land; William Gregg, Lot 12: “there was never more than fencing stuff on what is called barren“; Hon. John Yeo, proprietor of Lot 13: “[The] 500 acres generally termed ‘the barrens‘, I do not consider of value except for fence poles"; Samuel Ramsay, Lot 13: “The principal part of the barren land is covered with spruce, var [i,e. fir], &c. It was burnt land. Poles are valuable there for fencing purposes." In fact, as is evident in the statements of William Gregg and of John Yeo above, the description of a piece of woodland as being capable of supplying only fencing materials, was in effect a synonym for poor quality forest. ‘92 See Rackham (1986) (Chapters 9 and 10). Hedges, by the way, are not a labour-free fencing solution as they require regular maintenance through pruning and eventual re-laying. 75 he said, was around a garden in Charlottetown, though the plants were ”thriving as well as they do at home”, and he also advocated that beech hedges should be used to sub-divide their cleared land.493 Then ten years later John Lewellin (1832), in his advice to prospective immigrants from England, said that ”a few judicious persons have commenced permanent fences by planting quicksets” (again, almost certainly of British hawthorn)494, which he said were growing ’rapidly'. He also noted that ’spruce’ and 'fir' had been tried, and he suggested that the native beech, and what he called ’white maple' (i.e. red maple) might also be used. Forty to fifty years later, in the post-pioneer landscape of the 18705 and 1880s, it would seem that hedgerows were more common on the island than they had been earlier. At least they were visible enough to attract the comments of a few visitors: John Rowan (1876), another Englishman, said that the ’hedgerows’ of the island reminded him of the ’old-country’; while an American visitor, Anna Ward (1887) said there was ”almost an endless variety of hedges” on the island — though she seems to have been using the word ‘hedge’ somewhat loosely, applying it also to the stump fences that she had seen. She also said she had seen ”low, zigzag walls of sodded stones tipped with a closely cropped growth of stunted spruce”, as well as "dike—like inclosures, from which grow verdure-crowns of hemlock, hawthorn and spruce hedgerows”. These latter two types of hedge would seem to have been the result of the natural ability of these trees to colonize along field boundaries. Virtually contemporary with the comments of these two visitors are the many ’views’ of farm properties printed in ’Meacham’s Atlas’, and an examination of these reveals that a minority of farms did indeed have hedges, though many of these, occurring as they do along roadsides or around lawns and gardens, seem to have been planted for purely aesthetic reasons. However, there are also some hedges bordering arable fields and some of these are clearly stock- proof.495 Also evident in some of the illustrations ‘93 Johnstone 1822. 49‘ ‘Quicksets' are defined by the OED as “live slips or cuttings of plants, set in the ground to grow, especially of whitethorn [i.e. hawthorn] or other shrubs of which hedges are made (Oxford 1989). ‘95 Examples in ‘Meacham's Atlas' (Allen 1880) of stock-proof hedges around arable fields are seen in the views of the farms of Abraham Gill of Little York, Lot 34 (p. 54); William Large, of Little