Living Fence Posts for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCLXXVI

barbed wire in tree

Based on years of experience, our staffers firmly believe that there is no more dangerous freelancer than one who claims to be an expert... or is so expert that they head up some department at a content farm. We've already featured (eleven times!) one such self-declared expert who was formerly the "travel channel manager" at content farm Helium.com. Today's nominee, Gail Delaney, apparently fancies herself a horticulture expert, in part because she "has years of gardening experience" and edits gardening for "BellaOnline." Unfortunately, Gail didn't quite know how to address some poor shmuck's question, "How to Use Live Trees for Fence Posts."

We won't argue that Delaney didn't explain how to string barbed wire between living trees. Heck, you'd need to be particularly dumb not to know how to use a living tree in your fence line as an alternative to a post. No, where Delaney's post went all wonky-like was when she started listing plant species that might make good posts. According to Gail, you should,

"Choose a tree that forms a callus in a short time... Over 57 species of trees can be used as live fence posts, including Gliricidia sepium, Erythrina spp., Spondias spp. and Bursera simarouba [the failure to italicize is that of Leaf Group]."

We looked those four genera up, and all of them are limited to tropical or subtropical habitats; a strange choice for a writer based in the Dakotas. In fact, all of Delaney's references were about tropical plants (e.g., in Kenya, Costa Rica, Philippines...). Well, she did also share the expertise of a company that sells deer fencing, telling you to use "sturdy trees." Uhhh, yeah... duh.

Although the reference where she cribbed her list of trees referred to pollarding the living posts, Delaney never mentioned it. She probably should have, since pollarding the tree – regularly "topping" it – encourages a short, stout geometry. This helps prevent shading around crops.

Delaney was able to sneak her list past the "content editor" at eHow.com because that person probably knew even less about the topic than Gail. Then again, consider this: the OQ may have actually wanted to know if you can cut down a tree and make fence posts out of it... who knows?

Whatever the case, Delaney's answer wouldn't be of much use to anyone outside the tropics, so we're gonna award her the Dumbass of the Day with Gliricidia leaves. If Gail had done a few minutes' more research, she might have realized that the locusts (black locust, honey locust) are of the same family, the Fabaceae, as all of the plants she mentioned... and they make reasonably good live fence posts.

SI - BOTANY