A Hedgerow's Last Stand

In Bolingbrook, Illinois there is a remant hedgerow that was planted by farmers long ago. The dominant tree species here are Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera), which was commonly planted as a living fence between fields as Illinois was being settled in the mid 19th century. This part of the Chicago region has become almost completely developed now. The farms around here are gone, and this hedgerow is an gangly, overgrown reminder of a landscape that has vanished.

I paid the site a visit on the first day of spring. If you look closely you can see a faint yellow cast on the smaller branches. They're getting their color back after a long winter:

The outside of the hedgerow looks unkempt and non-descript, but the interior shows the original line of Osage-orange trees with branches arching to the ground:

The wood of Osage-orange is incredibly durable. Farmers used to attach barbed wire directly to the trunks of the trees, eliminating the need for fence-posts. It's not uncommon to see strands of rusted barbed wire still hanging on many decades later:

Hedgerows often became repositories of unwanted debris that cropped up around the farm. Over the years in such places I have seen rusted machinery, heaps of old herbicide cans, and other assorted junk. And lots of rocks. As fields were worked it would be easy to heave any rocks out of the way and into the nearby hedgerow. Some of these rocks were big, and it would have taken a lot of work to get them off to one side. The boulder below is about 4x4x2' in size, and it's not our local limestone. If this boulder were delivered in the last ice age it may have been on this site for over 10,000 years. These are also known as erratics:

There are a lot of different animals that take refuge in this rough patch. In the two years that I have been sporadically observing the site I have seen direct evidence (live or dead) of coyotes, rabbits, squirrels, hawks, deer, raccoons, and numerous songbirds. Here's one of the many nests in the hedgerow:

Hedgerows are linear, man-made artifacts in the landscape. When the farm was active the trees in the hedgerow would need some level of care to keep the hedgerow manageable. But at some point this hedgerow was let go, and other trees moved in. This Black cherry (Prunus serotina) tree below is a nice native hardwood that was likely seeded in by a bird. It's trunk is wildly distorted. I'm not sure if it was pinned somehow in it's youth, but it is quite alive and has reached the light on the eastern edge of the hedge:

This is a cross section view of the south end of the hedgerow. It's roughly 40-60' wide, and maybe 600' long:

This is the view just west of the hedgerow today. The adjacent field has been stripped of topsoil and leveled, ready for new buildings. The two buildings in the distance are an LA Fitness Center, and a Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World. There used to be a similar, larger hedgerow that was removed to make way for a new road in the foreground called Falconridge Way: