Back to Nature

To reach our home in rural Kansas we drive through several miles of farmland. Over the years I have watched the fields and houses evolve, some holding their own, but others declining and being overrun by the first wave of reforestation.

First a couple of Eastern red cedars pop up in a pasture. Then, before you know it, there are twenty, then forty.  

Meanwhile our native dogwood, moves in. This is not the flowering dogwood so prized and vaunted by southeastern states and the state tree of Missouri. Our native dogwood has but one purpose in life – to help reclaim pastures. It grows in copses, spreading underground until the copse is 15 feet wide. A shrub rather than a tree, it blooms modestly and produces white berries the size of large peas.  

Another interloper, the Osage orange (also called “hedge “ or “bois de arc,” among other names) sometimes shows up, Early farmers planted the trees in a row between fields as fences. Branches of these thorn-covered trees were woven together to form barriers that cattle could not cross. The tree produces “hedge apples,” bright green, hard as rocks, the size of large apples, each containing enough seeds to populate every pasture in Douglas County. Squirrels like to carry a hedge apple to a nearby spot and eat some of its seeds, letting some seeds fall to the ground to become new trees. 

For example, forty-three years ago a pasture not a mile from our house was home to cattle. But the farmer gave up the cattle business and the pasture fell into neglect. Little trees showed up. About twenty years ago the thirty-acre pasture was put up for sale and someone bought it. The new owners put in a water meter and a stand-faucet.

The new owners’ dream of building a home in the country didn’t work out for some reason and the cedars and hedge trees continued to grow. Today the pasture could not be properly called a pasture any more, as you can see n the photo below.

Several vast copses of dogwood have developed, too.

Along the fence row I also see mulberry and  honey locust trees, as well as lush forests of poison ivy. This is the first stage of a succession forest in Kansas. We describe it as the woods taking over. 

I think sometimes of the man who first cleared this land and the hours of hard work he spent chasing a dream. I think, too, of the people who bought the land with their unfulfilled dream of living in the country. Nature will triumph, as nature always does.

Copyright 2018 by Shirley Domer