Hedgeapple.com - Hedgeapple Seed Experiment

     I saw my first osage orange just a year ago while camping at Canyonlands National Park, Utah. My husband and I were walking with our two dogs not far from the Visitor's Center. I saw what looked like a dump site for tennis balls - they were round, yellow green, scattered around the base of a tree, and lying on top of a picnic table. I moved in for a better look and realized from their rough and convoluted skin I was not looking at tennis balls. Having never seen such things before I picked up one and stopped at the Visitor's Center to ask a ranger what they were. The chap I spoke too said he had grown up with them and as a kid called them "monkey brains" - not a very attractive name I thought. He then told me its true common name - "osage orange." For a California girl from Orange County, I liked that name much better. I kept the fruit I picked up that day (the ranger also told me they are inedible), and it now rests on a shelf in my study. It is desiccated, more brown than green, the size of a walnut, and hard as a rock. Since that visit to Canyonlands I have seen the osage orange mentioned only once - as a small photograph with caption in a decorating magazine! I had no idea the plant fascinates so many people, and has such a wide range. Thanks for you web site!

- Joanne

     For me, the "use" of the hedgeapple is solely emotional. For as far back as I can remember as a child in WV, each Fall my mom would take my sister and I for a ride in the country to the special places she knew where hedgeapples grew. We collected hedgeapples, bittersweet, walnuts and hickory nuts, and long-needle pine branches, and Mom decorated the outside of our house with them. We always had a few inside as well for the glorious citrus-y aroma they gave off when they became warm. After I grew up and moved away, I always knew when I came back for a visit in the Fall, Mom would have some waiting for me to bring home. Mom died in 1995, and hedgeapples have been few and far between for me since then. In the area of WV that I moved to, and then here in eastern KY, I would ask around if anyone knew where I could find hedgeapples and folks thought I was strange. They've never heard of them. Today I was visiting in north-central KY, and there outside my friend's window was a hedgeapple tree. I came home with a bag full and a big smile on my face. For just a while, I can reminisce about my girlhood and my Mom who loved to gather "natural" decorations each Fall.

- Pat