Sam, you've heard of "pleaching," but again, for other followers here who (like me!) haven't heard of it until today:

Pleaching or plashing is a technique of interweaving living and dead branches through a hedge creating a fence, hedge or lattices. Trees are planted in lines, and the branches are woven together to strengthen and fill any weak spots until the hedge thickens. Branches in close contact may grow together, due to a natural phenomenon called inosculation, a natural graft.

.... A bunch of skinny branches tied together in a crisscross like a kid’s sketch of a fence. Some people walk past it and chuckle. Others ask if we’re starting a garden teepee.
But this living fence? It’s the most important thing I’ve planted in years.
When my husband passed, the house went quiet in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I stopped caring how things looked outside. The shrubs grew wild. The mailbox leaned. And the wooden fence out front? Eventually collapsed entirely in a storm last spring.
I was going to hire someone to replace it, but something in me said… not yet.
I wanted to try something alive.
Something I’d have to tend to. Water. Watch grow. Like a slow promise to myself that maybe, just maybe, the quiet wouldn’t always feel so heavy.
I joined a few gardening groups on the Tedooo app to figure out how to build a living fence. I didn’t even know the term for it. Someone messaged me and said, “It’s called pleaching. Takes time, but you’ll fall in love with the process.” They were right.
I met a guy on the Tedooo app who sells starter sapling kits — I bought mine from him. He included a handwritten note that said, “Grow slowly. Stay.” I cried for ten minutes after opening that box.
Each tie I added was like a stitch through the grief. Every leaf that’s starting to push through right now feels like a whisper saying, “You stayed.”
This fence won’t keep anything out.
But it keeps something in.
It keeps me connected to the idea that beauty doesn’t always have to be fast. Or finished. It just has to keep going.
So no, it’s not much. Not yet.
But by next spring? It’ll be full and green and reaching for the sky.
And I will be, too.
Thanks, Tedooo — for the kit, the kindness, and the community that reminded me to try.