Boxthorn hedges are a common sight in Taranaki. Photo / Jock Phillips, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand
Boxthorn hedges are a common sight in Taranaki. Photo / Jock Phillips, Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand
Kem Ormond looks into Lycium ferocissimum, aka the boxthorn, which she considers a Taranaki icon and menace in equal measure. She finds out the inventive ways to control the tenacious hedges over the years, from tractors to Army vehicles.
OPINION
If I think of boxthorn, I always associate it with Taranaki; in fact, you could almost call it an icon of Taranaki.
Here, you will find rows and rows of prickly green hedge, some standing upright and others with a slight lean from age and the wind.
Boxthorn, like a lot of our other flora and fauna, was introduced into New Zealand from South Africa in the early 1870s.
It will grow in any soil, more or less, and when fully grown, which only takes a couple of years, no animal big or small would even contemplate making an escape through it.
The thorns are prone to getting stuck in the hooves of cattle, puncturing tractor tyres, and even piercing through the soles of gumboots.
Then there is the battle of keeping the boxthorn under some sort of control.
Until the middle of the last century, you didn’t want to be the unlucky person chosen to trim the hedges with a hand slasher.
Horses were used to pull the slashed pruning from the hedge, which ended up in piles to be burned.
Producing ways to keep boxthorn under control has resulted in some rather wacky ideas.
I read that a farmer in Pātea used an old sword to keep the hedge around his house trimmed. Another adapted a hay knife.
An adaption of the Swiss Army knife?
The Tawhiti Museum houses one of the Butler brothers' machines designed to tackle boxthorn hedges. Photo / Kem Ormond, Tawhiti Museum
Then in 1941 came a Swiss-born Inglewood engineer named Lou Butler, who decided to mount a large revolving three-meter blade on a Fordson tractor. Hey presto, Taranaki’s first mechanical hedge cutter was born.
And what a daunting, almost Frankenstein-looking machine it was.
Butler wasn’t new to engineering. Before building hedge cutters, he produced a variety of inventions such as a turf cutter, sheep sling, articulated trailer, trench digger, butter box press and the auto hay sweep.
If a labour-saving device was needed to be designed, he was the man.
Butler and his sons became well known in the Taranaki district for their hedge cutters.
All were home-built and were beasts of machines, having been adapted and modified on trucks, tractors, Army tanks and even Bren Gun Carriers.
With boxthorn hedges getting out of control – and with the availability after World War II of numerous ex-NZ Army vehicles – their fleet of hedge cutters grew.
If visiting the Tawhiti Museum in Hāwera, you will find in the Farm Power Hall tractor display a collection of the Butler Brothers’ early hedge cutters, created from a wide assortment of WWII service vehicles.
Among them is a rare survivor worldwide: a Local Pattern Observation Post Wheeled Vehicle.
Seeing these machines working in Taranaki caught the eye of another contractor, Frank Hooper, who grew up in Taranaki but moved to Hawke’s Bay, where the orchards were surrounded by shelter belts needing trimming.
Five years of planning and four engineers went into designing the first hedge cutter suitable for the large hedges encompassing orchards.
In 1965, Hooper’s bespoke model started trimming shelter belts on orchards.
While a gun carrier was suitable for the boxthorn in Taranaki, a Ford tractor was all the machine needed to be mounted on and enable it to manoeuvre around the tight spaces in an orchard.
Without the vision of both these men when it came to hedge cutters, we could have been in a much pricklier situation nowadays.
