Hedgeapple A sample of a hedgeapple, slightly bigger than a baseball, almost iridescent light green, with the ouward appearance of a brain.

It's fair to say that this series of essays has not been bathed in the soup of good news. While I have not sought out disaster and dismemberment to fuel some tabloid fantasy vision for the inquiring minds of my readers, neither have I been loath to lay out the greasy entrails of our modern world for their instructional and cautionary value. Consequently, my reputation is steeped in the unpleasant oils of fault-finding, negativity and abuse of conventional wisdom. Just last week I recall I delivered a blistering tirade against both Christmas and New Year conventions. None of this makes me a pleasant dinner companion.

Today I wish to redeem some scrap of the warm, open, honest human being I was so many years ago before I was corrupted by my surly reaction to excess, greed and vapidity. This holiday season I give you an uplifting vignette, a view of a bright center of wonderment which each of us probably still holds deep within us, and which I discovered quite by accident. Behold the hedgeapple.

I was twenty-seven years old when I discovered Maclura pomifera, and I was thirty before I saw one. In 1977 I stumbled into the passion of growing and admiring trees and shrubs which has consumed me until this hour. I was until then as many of you are now, able to distinguish maple from oak, but maybe not red maple from sugar maple or white oak from red, and completely ignorant of the world of magnolias or ginkgos or scores of other genera. Or osage orange.

But by the time we had accumulated enough wealth to afford a vehicle brave and competent enough to make a round trip to Jamaica Plain I knew enough about the tree to want to see it, to shake it's spiny hand, to own it in my Maine garden. It was, thus, at the Arnold Arboretum in May of 1980 that I first held its fruit in my hand.

Osage orange is a relatively small, usually twisted, frequently multi-trunked tree with a very small natural range. It originally grew only in Oklahoma and east Texas. When Woody Guthrie sang "I want to ride my pony on the reservation, way down yonder in the Indian nation, in those Oklahoma hills where I was born," he was riding through thickets of osage orange. It is a spiny tree and in its native range grows fast. Its branches weave together in a tangle which makes the crown picturesque and which, when the trees are planted close together and pruned, makes an impenetrable hedge. In the days before barbed wire changed the plains, osage orange was the cheapest and best way to control livestock; it was used in much the same way that hawthorn had been used for centuries in Europe, and was capable of producing a living wall which would turn away any animal larger than a bird or a rabbit. Consequently it was planted in the millions all across the country, wherever it would grow, and it proved adaptable far beyond its nativity.

The modern era has been hard on osage orange. Thousands of miles of hedgerow and shelterbelt have been bulldozed into oblivion for corporate agriculture and suburban tracts of homes and shopping malls. (Here I could easily lapse into the dark complaint which I have forsworn today.) But wherever it was once planted remnants, at least, remain, and many are large and old and tucked into odd forgotten corners where no one much notices them. It is fairly common, people tell me, in New Jersey, still.

We stand now about to gaze upon the picture of hope I have promised to paint. About the first of November, when my own trees were reminding me that fall was starting downhill at a faster rate, my wife and I returned to Boston for a day among the arboretum trees, as we often do. I brought home a bagfull of osage orange fruits, several of which sit on my desk today. If you have seen one you will remember it. If not, here it is: about four inches in diameter, rock hard at first, then softening to about softball consistency, it looks like nothing so much as a perfectly round, green brain. Its surface is convoluted in exactly that cerebral fashion. The color ranges from dull green through bright green to an almost fluorescent chartreuse. The tree fruits heavily and may provide hundreds of pounds of these cheerful, bright "apples" in a good season. They are not edible, although not poisonous. They reputedly repel insects, but so, reputedly, does sweetfern. I think every region of the country has some native plant with a reputation for keeping bugs out of drawers.

The chief virtue of osage orange fruits is their strange, bright beauty and the perfect way in which they fit the hand. They smell quite strongly of a sort of pseudo-citrus flavor. And it happens that each fall, from September through November, moving North to South, innocent persons come upon the great green orbs and are moved spontaneously to learn about the tree to which they have unwittingly become enthralled. And because we live in the age we do, their investigations lead them to their computers with their powerful search engines. Many of these pilgrims find their way to www.hedgeapple.com. This is a useless site. It serves simply to promote and honor one man's delight in the osage orange. Colorful, well constructed and fun, it is informational and entertaining in its own right. Nobody was ever hurt a bit by finding out something new. But wander down through the text and pictures and open the guest page. Read the short comments, anecdotes and appreciations posted there. These are the first, emotional outbursts of brand new lovers of the osage orange, and they border on the ecstatic.

Single mothers take their kids on picnics and discover osage orange.

Businessmen in strange towns stop their cars by a roadside tree which has littered the shoulder with fruit. Young lovers find great, green balls of autumn sunshine under their spines as they recline in the grass. They find them, they marvel, they seek knowledge and then they open their hearts to the wide world on the guestbook page of hedgeapple.com.

So all across this great country, now beset by all the horrors of crude, acquisitive, corrupted, selfish, remote and harried modern life with which we so often wrestle in my essays, people reconnect with some old, wild joy when they meet the osage orange. Then, moved by the depth of their delight, they bring the gospel to those still lost in darkness.

If you will invest ten minutes in feeling better about the future, visit the website. If you have no computer, please call me and I will arrange for you an audience with my remaining fruits before they shrivel enough that my wife makes me toss them into the woods. But don't ever let it be said henceforth that Cooper has no love for his fellow man in his cynical heart, even if it did take a humble green fruit and an internet subscription to shake out the evidence.