The Slat Pack

What adds romance to a humble house and turns a snarl of plants into a garden? The clean sweep of a picket fence. Any child knows the thrill of taking a stick to those stakes, and most grown-ups understand them as a sweet sign of domestic life. Both welcoming and cautionary, they invite peeking, and they also say, “Stand back,” but seldom as firmly as other fences. In fact, their whitewashed palings are often used more as foils for flowers than as guardians of privacy.

One of the best-loved American fences, the picket dates back to 8th century China, where squared-off wooden stakes sometimes marked out garden plots. More recent ancestors were medieval European fences as well as the closely set stockade barriers that American colonists brought from England and used to wall out the wilderness. Such sturdy, high-topped palisades also prevented roaming livestock from eating crops and their sharp stakes kept chickens out of kitchen gardens. Gradually, as settlements became towns and Americans prospered, a much more elaborate fence evolved to edge the public side of private properties, proclaiming the owners’ wealth and taste.

Picket fence styles vary with the architecture. For Colonial houses, they were plain and spare; for Gothic buildings, they had pointed, forbidding ends, while Victorian architecture demanded greater elaboration, such as lathe-turned posts and heart-cut tops. In California, picket fences are most likely seen in front of East Coast-style homes such as Cape Cod cottages and Connecticut farmhouses. The gardens that spill around them are often cottage-style too--awash in hollyhocks and rambling roses, day lilies and delphiniums, plants that shine best against a guiding edge and remind us of simpler times.