American Hedgerow (Part I)

Enclosure, extraction, and the marginal

Our home between the hedge trees, in warmer times.

“In 1847, I issued my first circular to the people, offering the Osage orange plants for sale. In describing the plants the circular stated:

“‘It is a native of Arkansas and Texas, and will grow on any soil where common prairie-grass will grow. Overflowing the land does not harm it. It will live for weeks, even months, entirely under water. It endures all climates, from Boston to New Orleans, perfectly well. Prairie fires will not destroy it or often injure it. It is armed with a very stout thorn under every leaf. Its dense iron branches soon become so interlocked that no domestic animal, not even a common bird, can pass through it. Both its thorns and its bitter acrid juice prevent all animals and insects from browsing or feeding on its branches. Its seed is like the orange seed and its root like the hickory. Consequently it can never spread into the field. One hedge around a farm secures orchards, fruit-yards, stables, sheepfolds, and pasture-grounds from all thieves, rogues, dogs, wolves, etc. One good gate, well locked, makes the whole farm secure against all intruders. It may be trained so high as to afford shelter to stock and break the rough prairie winds.’”

-Jonathan Baldwin Turner, quoted in The Life of Jonathan Baldwin Turner, by His Daughter Mary Turner Carriel (1911)

Our home is built on an old fence-line, a linear run of a few thousand feet, once dissected sharply by barbed wire that we’ve now cut and coiled and stowed away as crumbling, rusting scrap, though I still hold a few corroded bits for remembrance. This intentional delineation remains, in some fashion, among the weathered hedge posts and multiple generations of hackberry, pin oak, chokecherry, and Osage orange subdividing the slope that rolls west of here to the plow-gutted bottomlands from the broad and thatchy upland shoulder. Even in the cold leaflessness of winter, these trees of the remnant fence-line are teeming with life both dormant and active, their trunks flickering with chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches that hunt over the peeling bark for frozen larvae. The rusted steel cut out, what remains are the trees, the progeny of long dead matriarchs, risen in the dropped seed and squirrel shit that collected along the wire for decades, the arching limbs of Osage orange, the highways of eastern gray squirrels that haul chunks of frozen hedge-balls into the safety of holes and crotches, the silent witnesses to eras of extraction and regeneration.

Over time, this fence-line has become a trace-way of seed and survival– the spiny cathedrals of rough hedge-limb, orange-hued bark and thorny crowns that shelter sparrows and shrikes, overgrown and untilled, underpinned by prickling brambles and poison ivy. Old elms, sickened with pest and disease shed bark and crumble, hosting oyster mushrooms and red-bellied woodpeckers. Wild cherry suckers and dogwood have arisen here to escape the plow, the disk, and the planter. A diverse-aged chorus of pin oaks stands sentinel, obfuscating human passage through the hedge, its marcescent canopy stitched together with squirrel dreys and fat blue jays.

Here and there, down and along the natural drop of the slope, on the edges of draws and eroded gullies, or at final rest in the bottomlands, dispersed hedge-fruits have borne out new generations of Osage orange, but the seed fails to travel at a great distance. If they make it to the creek, and the creek has water, I suppose they could float, but the hefty fruits, containing hundreds of seeds deep in the flesh, are considered to be an example of biological anachronism, that is an obsolete evolutionary trait. When a squirrel eats hedge-fruit, it is pulling away the pith and flesh and consuming the seeds, leaving behind a murder scene of torn yellow flesh and nibbled husks. Of the 300 or so odd seeds per fruit, only a few remain viable– and nearby the mother tree– when consumed this way. It seems that the fruit of Osage orange likely co-evolved with Pleistocene megafauna like mastodons, ground sloths, impossibly large armadillos, freaky beavers, massive skunks, and the like. These big weirdos did not spend their days nibbling the seeds out of the flesh, they just ate them whole, seed and all, like mulberries, a cousin to Osage orange. Then, as large animals are often compelled to do, they took massive dumps all over, plopping out intact, viable hedge seed into fertile plops.

Hedgeball frass leftover by the squirrels.

There are many hypotheses on why these creatures died out, and I’m not stepping in that. What we do know is that lacking megafauna seed dispersal, stewardship of this tree must have fallen to the people indigenous to its known natural range. The wood of Maclura pomifera is exceptionally dense, strong, rot-resistant and springy, the grain twisted and coiled in a way which makes excellent bow staves. While the pre-Columbian range of Osage orange was seemingly limited to parts of the Red River basin in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas, as well portions of the Blackland Prairie and post oak savannas, bows made of its wood were found among indigenous groups well outside that range. The Scottish botanist John Bradbury, who explored a good deal of the US interior in the early 19th century remarked that Osage bow-wood was valued very highly– reportedly worth a horse and blanket. It is not impossible to imagine that this was something of a human-stewarded commodity timber crop, of sorts, a closely guarded piece of biological infrastructure, sheltered in one unique region.

Without cutting these trees and counting their rings, it is difficult to determine their age. There are many ways to approximate this using a measuring tape, but the multi-trunked nature of the big old hedge trees make the task difficult, at least to this amateur forester. The human planting of Osage orange up here, outside of it’s original historic range, would have likely come in at least two documented waves– Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration which undertook the planting of millions of trees across the heartland to hold soil and ward off erosion during the dust bowl era, and another, less renowned undertaking, known as “Hedge-Mania”, in the mid-nineteenth century– around the same time Northeast Missouri came under white settlement.

JB Turner circa 1860’s

Jonathan Baldwin Turner (Born December 7, 1805) was an American scholar, abolitionist, and agriculturalist. He is also one of the primary figures responsible for agricultural and land grant universities in the US, and was an assistant in the Underground Railroad. But what is perhaps a bit more overlooked in terms of his influence, is the development and promotion of Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) plantings throughout the prairie states, for better or worse.

As it had been for thousands of years, the tallgrass prairies of our region had long been absent of plentiful wood for the construction of split-rail fences. Without the ability to contain livestock, this ecosystem could not be cultivated or made “productive” for the purposes of settlement and expansion. During his time as a professor at Illinois College, Turner began to experiment with Osage orange, that is, hedge, as a living fence material and future timber source in the tall grass, inspired by the long-standing and stewarded hedgerow systems of England, a subject I am not at all qualified to dive into. Previous attempts to utilize the old world Hawthorn trees seen in English hedge had failed, as the species was unsuitable to the area’s soils, climate, and pest and disease pressure.

According to Turner’s biography, he originally obtained seed sourced from the banks of the Osage River in Arkansas from fellow abolitionist and shit-stirrer David Nelson, a man who would soon be run out of town by a pro-slavery mob, right here in Northeast Missouri, where he started a protestant agricultural / labor college in Marion County. The experiments started on Turner’s farm in Butler, Illinois, as well as at the college, though he initially struggled with making the broad implementation of these plantings efficient. Planting and maintaining hedge was labor-intensive, and the thorns provided a great deal of bloodletting, despite being particularly unable to contain hogs. These challenging, inefficient practices are still promoted on homesteading blogs and the Mother Earth News in modern times, by writers who have never worked with Osage hedgerow, which is unsurprising. Soon, these experiments with Osage orange came to be known as locally as ‘Professor Turner’s Folly’.

Turner would eventually devise techniques, and even planting machinery to enclose the broad, wild prairie, tract by tract and paddock by paddock, into a tamed landscape that could feed the growing settler population, and provide it with clearly demarcated property lines. During his subsequent promotion of these adapted hedge-laying practices, thousands of linear miles of Osage orange was planted throughout the Midwest and plains states, from around the late 1830’s on until being supplanted by the cheaper to install barbed wire, originally developed in the late 1860’s to early 1870’s. For about three decades, America’s heartland underwent a period of “Hedge-Mania”, even in the midst of the Civil War:

“For many years Professor Turner kept a man the South to gather Osage orange balls and prepare the seed. In 1861 he wrote to Washington D.C., to ask if he could continue that part of his business and not be considered disloyal to the government. The officials replied that he could so continue, but that it would have to ba at his own risk; the government would not be responsible for any loss. The demand for hedges increased rather than diminished during the dark days of the Civil War. Plants sold for ten dollars a thousand. But the risk and difficulty of getting the seed from Arkansas increased, and finally the agent wrote that he could not remain there; the fact of his having business relations with North endangered his life.

…

Professor Turner wrote a great deal for agricultural papers, and he now urged the farmers to let Osage orange trees grow in their hedges, twenty-five feet apart, and to bring their oranges to him– that he would pay a good price for them. This they did, Professor Turner often paying as high as three to five dollars a bushel for oranges, and the problem of getting Osage seed for hedges was again solved.”

-The Life of Jonathan Baldwin Turner

I have seen the term hedge-mania (or hedgemania) referenced in several articles I consulted in researching this time piece, without yet coming across the original use of the phrase. The Kansas Forest Service claims it was declared in a local (in-state?) newspaper, whereas other sources claim it came about when Osage orange seed was being shipped en masse to the Pacific Northwest for similar hedging purposes.

The fertile prairie soils, when seeded with this Maclura pomifera, were capable of sprouting a “horse-high, bull-strong, hog-tight” thicket of thorny growth in as little as four years. With thick leather mitts, farmers could further intertwine the razor-lined branches as stems in a technique known as plashing. While precise records of just how much hedge was planted during hedge-mania seem to not exist at this time, one source states that in Kansas alone, between 1865 and 1939, 40,000 miles were established.

An historic hedgerow at Homestead National Historic Park (courtesy National Park Service)

Like all enclosure techniques, this practice would lead to the fracturing of the prairie. Wildlife could no longer move across great distances as easily, and cover for ground-dwelling predators, combined with roost space for aerial predators, quickly aided in cutting down and extinguishing ground-nesting bird populations. Field by field, the earth built by thousands of years of fire, bison-trampling, and regrowth of tall-grass vegetation would be routed out by plows and left to bleed away into the turgid waterways. The tallgrass prairie would shrink to less than 1% of its original estimated 150-250 million acre land-base over the course of fewer than 20 decades. While the establishment of this biological infrastructure outside its native range would have largely negative consequences for prairie habitat, it is noted as perhaps providing supporting habitat for the Loggerhead shrike ((Lanius ludovicianus) lanius meaning “butcher” and ludovicianus meaning “of Louisiana” ).

To the observer untrained in ornithological appreciation, the loggerhead shrike is a sick little freak. Sometimes dubbed the “butcher bird” or “murder bird”, they are not considered true “birds of prey” but are passerine, about the size of a robin, but with a chonky head, and hence not so strong in the talons. They make up for this by way of their massively strong necks– while largely subsisting on insects, shrikes will take larger prey, whipping and twisting snakes, mice, lizards, toads, crayfish and such around to break their necks, and then impaling them on spines, thorns and barbed wire. The impalement is sometimes the means by which larger prey is killed, but also serves as an anchoring tool for the meat. While shrikes have strong bills for tearing flesh, their talons are, again, weak. This is not an act of bird barbarism, just simple tool use. The loggerhead shrike not only appears sadistic, but thieving, at least to folks who like to ascribe human behaviors to birds.

Loggerhead Shrike - Illinois Department of Natural Resources / Charles Murphy Photography

From its preferred vantage point, about twenty feet up and overlooking broad open land (as is often found along the abandoned and remnant American hedgerow), the loggerhead shrike will resort to allowing birds that are better at digging up grubs, worms and larvae to harvest these treats, and then swoop down and wrestle the wriggling fat and protein from their beaks. Osage orange also seems to provide loggerhead shrikes their ideal structure for nest-building, and so these biologically anachronistic trees offer at least one species in decline a unique opportunity to hunt and nest, which did not exist on the once open prairie.

Some prairie life, common and rare, has found shelter among the arches and spires of introduced Osage orange. The vesper sparrow is another bird which is at risk of becoming threatened or endangered without conservation action. A small, ground-feeding, ground-nesting grasslands sparrow, this bird co-evolved, and benefits from open tall-grass prairie, but with less than 1% of that remaining, it is noted to have found survival opportunities in American hedgerow, which is also becoming increasingly scarce itself. As a marginal area, out of reach of mowers and machinery, which intercepts windblown seed, and a safe perching (and shitting) place, hedgerows in the midwest have the potential to harbor a small amount of the at-risk diversity of the tall grass prairie, even if their early intent was the enclosure and extraction of the original ecosystem.

Vesper sparrow (Pooecetes gramineus)

It wouldn’t be too long before Midwest farmers began to reconsider these plantings, though not on account of ecological principles. The trees, with their wide-spreading roots and out-stretched branching form, shaded field edges and pulled water from adjoining crops in dry years. Maintenance on the thorny tangle was labor-intensive– in order to increase yields and profits (on those occasions that there were profits in farming), the hedgerows needed pruning of both the limbs and the roots themselves. As barbed wire became common, the market for solid, rot-resistant fence-posts became enormous, and the limbs and trunks of Osage orange became renowned for their utility as post material. Within a few generations, farmers went from planting live hedge to cutting it up and selling it to be re-planted as dead timber.

By the turn of the 20th century, our local Extension Service and Soil Conservation agencies here in Missouri began promoting an alternative hedge-planting– the multi-flora rose, which we now in part receive a federal contract for removing from our land with fire, grazing, mechanical disturbance, or if we so chose, herbicides. While hedge-mania disappeared with a whimper, some of the remaining flora and fauna of the nearly extinct prairie would find shelter in the field margins still clothed in the thorny embrace of old hedge, laying in wait for the cultivation to end.

Many of us have come to live safely in the margins, among the misunderstood shrikes and the corroded wire, and the altars of old hedge-posts festooned in offerings of frozen yellow flesh and sparrow droppings. The enclosure and extraction of resources has not ceased with the planting of Osage orange, and in this previous project of settlement and colonization, Maclura pomifera is a hapless innocent– an evolutionarily “obsolete” gift, ascribed purpose by multiple human cultures and the dramatic clashing of flora and fauna, native and migrant. It may not be a part of what the prairie once was, but we live in a world of rapid change, a world in need of roots and shelter for the marginal. Hedge fits the bill, and so this is where we built our home, between two hedge trees, a fruiting mother and towering father,* that have lived through one fire and two bulldozer attacks since we came here.

If you’ve been paying any attention lately, you’ll notice a lot of little mobs of people are getting very whooped up about extraction, enclosure, settler-colonialism, and somewhat ironic hot takes on immigration, just as they had during hedge-mania. And little mobs of people have a way of creating horror shows that would make a loggerhead shrike blush. But we are offered some shelter in the margins, some respite in the circumstantial remnants of mastodon-shit, indigenous human stewardship, and the enterprising ambition of at least one complex, lesser-discussed historical figure, among the thorny embrace of an injured wilderness. We built our home here between these two trees to join the squirrels and shrikes and watch the horizon from a place of safety, a sanctified thicket of twisting timber and quiet testimony to the whispering rattle of tall grass thatch that will never know the plow. I don’t know if we’ll ever go back to what was before, but right now, we need margins like this.

*I am not making assumptions about tree gender here, at least in terms of how it is defined it botany as Osage orange is dioecious. Nature is still joyfully queer at times, and hedge’s cousin mulberry is a dioecious plant noted for changes gender later in life.

Author’s note: I learned much more about hedge than I can fit into one entry of the almanac, including indigenous uses and history, the Great Plains shelterbelt, and its modern potential as a livestock fodder crop. Exploring these subjects in further detail will require more time than I have this week– I look forward to expanding on Osage orange in a future “part two” as I did previously with mulberry. In the meantime, we might get above freezing soon, and that means tree sugaring and corvid activity, two subjects I promise to cover next, unless I get distracted. BB