Is an osage orange a good tree to plant in Indiana?
Osage Orange can work here, with caveats. Not native but naturalized and found throughout Indiana, planted historically for fence rows and fence posts — Purdue documents this history directly. In central Indiana it usually turns up as a surviving hedgerow line at the back of a property or along a former field boundary, which means shared-ownership and property-line questions come up more often than with other species.
What you'd be signing up to clean up
Female trees drop grapefruit-to-softball-sized green hedge apples in fall, heavy enough to dent hoods and crack windshields on anything parked beneath, and they rot down into a slick mess on lawns and drives. Thorny twig litter is the second complaint — it punctures mower tires and makes hand raking genuinely unpleasant.
Where to keep it away from
Shallow lateral roots surface with age and lift adjacent walks and drives, and old hedgerow trees often run roots along the former fence line well outside the dripline where nobody thinks to look. It also suckers from roots and stumps, so a trunk cut and left untreated regrows as a thorny thicket rather than simply dying.
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