Because very few artists and art historians were also farmers, many of the so-called “haystacks” in western art actually depict stacks of wheat or other grain crops. For centuries before the hay-baler and combine-harvester dropped bales of similar dimensions in hayfields and wheat-fields, haymaking and harvesting created very different landscapes. In many parts of the world they still do. Hay was cut from green grass with a scythe, laid in parallel windrows on the ground, dried and turned with hand-held or horse-drawn rakes after a few days of sunshine, raked by hand or horse-drawn sleds into “cobs” or “cocks” or head-high stacks in the field for further drying, then carted to the farmyard or barn where they were made into more durable ricks or stacks out of the weather’s way. Grain crops were cut with scythe or sickle when the plants had already turned from green to gold; the fallen plants were immediately bundled into a sheaf, tied with a few straw stalks; then six to eight sheaves were leaned against each other to form a reasonably weather-proof stook or shook, which stood in the field until the sheaves were carted off to compose larger even more rain-resistant stacks, grain-ends in, cut-stalks out, either in a barn or left out in the fields. Monet's Meules The French meule can refer to either stack, but even a cursory examination of Monet’s famous meules (often casually translated as “haystacks”) reveals the essential differences between meules de foin and meules de grain. The latter cereal stacks, made of sheaves often used to be thatched as protection against the autumn rains and continued to stand in the fields through the winter months until the threshing (separation of grain from straw) was done, usually by the early spring. Many of Monet’s meules are highlighted with snow, and all of these and the other tidy cones in varying lights and seasons are grainstacks. His haystacks are relatively few, always done in the dappled light of summer, and to be even more precise, they are haycocks, small, shaggy, temporary heaps of hay, soon to be carted off to the farmsteads of Giverny. [http://www.hayinart.com/000117.html#more]