The line was initially made of dead, thorny material such as the Indian Plum but eventually evolved into a living hedge that grew up to 12 feet high and was compared to the Great Wall of China.
The principal tasks were patrolling and maintaining the hedge; in 1869 alone the customs men carried out 18 million miles (29 million km) of patrols, dug 2 million cubic feet (57,000 cubic metres) of earth and carried over 150,000 tons of thorny material for the hedge.
If thorny hedge material is desired, mainly as a deterrent to keep out unwanteds, then the barberries are a good choice.
But, when I think about what was missing from the finale, it is inevitably on a personal level: I was drawn to "Girls" as a series about a messy young person who insisted that she was an artist, a train wreck who spun her humiliation into material, whose thorny ambition hovered between grandiosity and something legitimate.
In Karamoja, clearance at the protected kraal is mandatory not only for security reasons but also for the establishment of kraals because woody plants, particularly thorny acacia, provide building materials.
A18 Pornography in the Library Some people using computers at public libraries are clicking away at sexually explicit material, creating a thorny issue for libraries nationwide: how to balance community standards against the First Amendment rights of patrons.
The question of how the immaterial mind affects the material body remains a thorny philosophical problem, but on a practical level, "our understanding of the brain-body dialogue has made jaw-dropping advances in the last decade or two," says Raison.
A self-retooling robotic hand that Redmond designed was also able to work with 10 materials at once, to address thorny problems of printing complex tissues, such as blood vessels within organs.
But some users are also clicking away at sexually explicit material, creating one of the thorniest issues that libraries nationwide now face: balancing community standards against the First Amendment rights of patrons who use the computers to view X-rated material.
Like the Aztecs, they pursued specific material goods, obsessively combing their empire for the thorny oyster (spondylus princeps) revered for the deep blood-red colour of its shell.
You have to commit to concentrating, integrating new material, persevering when you might be stopped by thorny words or elusive concepts.
