In the United States, the traditional view embraced by society is that fences are European, out of place in the American landscape. This notion turns up repeatedly in nineteenth-century American writing about the landscape. One author after another denounces 'the Englishman's insultingly inhospitable brick wall, topped with broken bottles.' Frank J. Scott, an early landscape architect who had a large impact on the look of America's first suburbs, worked tirelessly to rid the landscape of fences, which he derided as a feudal holdover from Britain. Writing in 1870, he held that 'to narrow our own or our neighbor's views of the free graces of Nature' was selfish and undemocratic. To drive through virtually any American suburb today, where every lawn steps right up to the street in a gesture of openness and welcome, is to see how completely such views have triumphed. After a visit to the United States, British novelist Vita Sackville West decided that 'Americans... have no sense of private enclosure.' In many American suburbs such as the one where I grew up, a fence or a hedge along the street meant one thing: the family who lived behind it was antisocial, perhaps even had something to hide. Fences and hedges said: Ogres within skip this place on Halloween. Except for these few dubious addresses, each little plot in our development was landscaped like a miniature estate, the puniest 'expanse' of unhedged lawn was made to look like a public park. Any enjoyment of this space was sacrificed to the conceit of wide-open land, for without a fence or hedge, front yards were much too public to spend time in. Families crammed their activities into microscopic backyards, the one place where the usefulness of fences and hedges seemed to outweigh their undemocratic connotations. But the American prejudice against fences predates the suburban development. Fences have always seemed to us somehow un-American. Europeans built wailed gardens Americans from the start distrusted the hortus conclusus. If the space within the wall was a garden, then what was that outside the wall? To the Puritans the whole American landscape was a promised land and to draw lines around sections of it was to throw this paramount idea into question. When Anne Bradstreet, the Massachusetts colony's first poet, set about writing a traditional English garden ode, she tore down the conventional garden wall—or (it comes to the same thing) made it capacious enough to take in the whole of America. The nineteenth-century transcendentalists, too, considered the American landscape 'God's second book' and they taught us to read it for moral instruction. Residues of this idea persist, of course we still regard and write about nature with high moral purpose (an approach that still produces a great deal of pious prose). And though, in our own nature writing, guilt seems to have taken the rhetorical place of nineteenth-century ecstasy, the essential religiosity remains. We may no longer spell it out, but most of us still believe the landscape is somehow sacred, and to meddle with it sacrilegious. And to set up hierarchies within it—to set off a garden from the surrounding countryside—well, that makes no sense at all. In Para. 1, Frank J. Scott's observation implies that nature ______.