Last weekend we went to the Lynwood Cafe in Collector for my birthday lunch. There's more below about the cafe, but while I was there, this bowl of nobbly fruit called my attention. I was told that they were  Osage oranges, from an old tree growing locally. "Don't eat them, they're poisonous" and "sniff them, don't they have a nice smell?" were all I could learn about them until I got back home to the Web.

The Osage tree is named after the Osage Indians who lived near the Arkansas River (Osage is actually a bastardised mishearing of their name Wazhazhe apparently meaning "war people") and the tree was discovered in the push to open up the prairies beyond the Mississippi. It was identified as early as 1804 (on the famous Lewis and Clark expedition).

The Indians used its tough springy wood for bows and war clubs, leading early French settlers to call it 'Bois d'arc' which became 'Bodark' to the settlers in St Louis who quickly recognised it's unique qualities. The tree is tough and thorny and when saplings are planted close together (they even planted them on an angle so that they intertwined) they grow quickly to a strong impenetrable hedge that was perfect for retaining stock in the days before barbed wire. It had the reputation for being "horse-high, bull-strong, and hog-tight" after only four years. If it isn't kept trimmed it grows into a tree over 20 meters (60ft) tall and around 2 meters thick.

The wood is hard and durable with natural resistance to fungus and insects. Even when the advent of barbed wire opened up larger areas of land, the Osage wood was used for fence posts. The posts lasted at least 50 years in the ground. Its density means that it will sink in water and even the green wood burns very hot.

The attractive green fruit are about the size of an orange, and have a distinctive almost citrus smell, but the tree is closer to a mulberry (and silk worms will eat its leaves). The fruit is a complex compound of separate fruiting parts with their own seeds and they form a pithy whole that bleeds a white bitter sap when cut.  Squirrels and other animals can eat them with out ill-effect, they were even called 'horse-apples'.

The Latin name is Macluria Pomifera, a name reached after some apparent friction with a famous American botanist called  Rafinesque who first described it in 1817. The name Macluria comes from William Maclure who was described as the father of American geology, (and who I found was part if an interesting 'utopian' religious community in Indiana called New Harmony.)

There are a number of web pages all of scrappy quality about the startling Osage orange, so I've saved a PDF from Alabama Forestry here that has more information and the illustration at left. There are some nice pictures of the cut fruit and leaves on www.kaweahoaks.com and of the thorns and an old tree here. Doing a web search I found an Australian craft wood supplier that sold the seasoned wood for turning and craft construction. The wood also seems to be used for musical instruments and is still preferred for archery bows. 

I'll try and track the local tree down and photograph it.
(The osage story continues in a later diary entry here)

With such a wide range of good local wines, it's an embarrassment to admit that we only drink them on special occasions at home, and dining out. It's such a change to the culture of places such as in Italy. When we were in Montefalco in Umbria, the local wine is drunk in preference, and all outside varieties disparaged. Maybe given another few hundred years of everyone setting up vineyards at the current rate, we'll have the same approach.

The biggest deterrent is cost. Small vineyards, small picking in a cold climate makes for an expensive wine. None of the local wines sell under $15, (usually for $25 or so a bottle), and our 'regular drinking' budget is about $10 a bottle. But on special occasions like lunch at the Lynwood Café, it was time for the Larkhill Reisling. We've had it before and on the limited (and reasonably priced) wine list it stood out. I rang earlier to see if they were licensed, thinking I'd take the bottle of Montefalco Sagrantino that Carol from Living Italy gave me (which prompted that thought above). They said they charge $2.50 per head corkage but with only two drinkers (18 year olds Kate and Kial are still on P's and were driving later and Aurore is 16 and just 'tasting') I decided to leave it at home for another time.

I'd driven through Collector a few times and stopped there once for petrol, but the most we'd heard about the Lynwood Café had come from the Sydney food publications. All of whom gave it the thumbs up. It's about forty minutes drive from Bungendore and the café was packed when we arrived at mid-day. It cleared within minutes, obviously coffee and cake customers going on to Canberra.

I liked the Lynwood Café. The menu sticks to a limited range of simple food, with seasonal specials, it's well cooked and served by fresh faced, friendly (and attractively rounded) local girls in warm and slightly rough at the edges surroundings. No pretension, just right. The prices were about right for the food quality and sizes, and the meal with desserts and coffees for five of us with a bottle of wine was about $150. Not country pub prices, but what you'd expect to pay to keep a place like the Lynwood open. I've some pictures of it here. (Approx 4x25k images x 2 popup pages)

In the six years I've been traveling the Bungendore roads I've wanted to photograph the dead kangaroos. In all that time, these are my first images.

I don't know why this is. Perhaps it's the speed I pass them that makes it difficult to stop, and then not remembering where they were so I could pull over safely on the return trip, but there must be more to it. I've watched these dead creatures (and smelt them in summer) with as much attention as anything I look at. When I traveled the road every day to work, there were times when the sense of doom from the blood soaked and splattered carcasses that smeared the roads, was like a vision of Armageddon. 

There is everything from the pathetic to the beautiful in these dead bodies. One I remember clearly was a dark, almost black carcass that had fallen in a group of tussocks that had been sprayed with bright purple weed killer. Some of them just appear in your headlights looking like a crumpled overcoat and are gone next day. Small ones that fall in the road, seen on a trip in the morning, are pieces of hide and bone when returning. (A few dozen transports running over you has that effect). Others like this one above are quickly attacked by crows and get pulled apart. You watch pieces disappear over days, feeding foxes and an occasional farm dog. It even gets a bit Peter Greenway (Z and Two Noughts) at times, when the bodies are marked with big red spray-painted crosses that mean the WIRES people have checked that it's dead, and there are no joeys in a pouch.

Peter Purvis, one of the founders of Oxford Scientific Films (who do a lot of the special lens, rigs and stop motion work for the best BBC wildlife documentaries), did an amazing time-lapse sequence of a mouse carcass decomposing. You see the maggots working together so their juices help breakdown the tissue, traveling in waves from head to tail and back again. He was asked what he'd like to film most and said his 'magnum opus' would be to film the decay and disappearance of an elephant. Maybe I should plan a roadside edge documentation of a dead kangaroo over time. It would be a nice Australian statement ... about something.

If you're up to it, there's a large image here that shows some of the distress that I feel about seeing these creatures every day. 700 pixels wide, 170k.