If I think of our 120 acre farm in Osage County as its own little world—and I do—then that topography is marked by special places strung together as on a treasure map or one of those magical hand drawn maps from The Lord of the Rings (yes, I admit it, I’m a fan).  As I and my five dogs wend our way on regular walks, we mark off and enjoy each landmark: the four very different ponds, the draw creek, the CRP prairie, the wooded areas, the pine grove.  One of my favorite spots is what I have come to call “the picnic grove”.  It’s really just a hedgerow, but it’s a hedgerow of fully grown Osage Orange, and they provide a welcome and ample canopy of shade at a high point of the land, affording a pleasing and peaceful view of the 110 Mile Creek valley.

If you want to understand Osage County, you have to know about the Osage Orange tree.  In Osage County and in the central and southern rural midwest in general, the Osage Orange tree—which I had never heard of until I moved here, is a lynchpin of the prairie topography and culture.  You see this useful and attractive tree lining the fields and meadows, and, in another incarnation, as knarled, irregular fenceposts which will stand for generations. 

Dave Mahon , the realtor who showed us what is now our place (“I think I’ve found your farm,” he had said on the phone—and he was right) called them “hedge” trees. He’d learned that descriptive name from his father-in-law, who is a Kansas farmer.  Osage Orange appear all over eastern Kansas along the borders of fields—as hedges and full grown windbreaks—excellent as barriers and for shade and shelter.

Osage hedgerows, from a distance, remind me of the fields in England with their much lower and lusher hedgerows of rough bushes that substitute for fences and which break up the bright green countryside into a charming irregular checkerboard with their darker green hedge lines.  Hedge trees in Kansas are big tough trees, more suited to the wild winds and sometimes blinding sun and heat of Kansas and the prairie, but they do demarcate the fields in a pretty way that brings variety and contrast to the landscape.

As I said earlier, Osage Orange trees make great fence posts. They do not rot; they will last forever.  In fact, Orange were originally planted and pruned as an early form of barbed wire fence (they have thorns)—or rather barbed wire fence came along to mimic the effect of an Osage Orange hedge—“Horse High, Bull Strong and Hog Tight.”  The wood is exceptionally dense and heavy—and the heartwood is truly “orange” as are the very tips of its wide-ranging roots, roots  I once mistook for a snake in the creek.  The wood was  highly prized by Native Americans for making bows—and thus in other areas it’s called bois d’arc or bodark.  Osage Orange trees really do grow a fruit that mildly resembles an orange, but only on the female trees.  Around here folks call them “hedge apples”.

So this is a tree of the prairie—humble, uncelebrated, strong, tough, durable, useful and really very attractive with its twisted rough bark and broadly spreading branches.  And the shade in the Osage Orange picnic grove on our farm—well that’s a special gift.  On Mother’s Day, my husband and our youngest daughter took our typical circuit around the farm. When we reached the picnic grove, I found that they had put a wooden bench under those trees as a surprise for me.  So now on our treks across the farm, we can stop a while to sit and enjoy a quiet moment under the canopy of those tough, sheltering trees.

For more information on Osage Orange Trees:
http://www.lewis-clark.org/content/content-article.asp?ArticleID=2523
http://www.gpnc.org/osage.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osage-orange
http://www.na.fs.fed.us/pubs/silvics_manual/volume_2/maclura/pomifera.htm