The under-appreciated Osage Orange
Osage Orange (Maclura pomifera) is one of the more curious small trees of the Ozarks. The unusual fruit is a large, green, grapefruit-sized pome with outer texture that looks like brain tissue. As one of the largest fruits of any woody plant in the United States, it is a curiously useless food unless you were among the megafauna such as mastadons and woolly mammoths wandering through the Ozarks 13,000 years ago. These giants munched on the large fruits, dispersing the seeds. It’s out-of-place in today’s natural ecosystem. For the most-part the fruits fall on the ground and disintegrate, seemingly ignored by wildlife.
Maclura commemorates William Maclure (1763-1840), an American geologist. In older works, it is called Maclura aurantiaca or Toxylon pomiferum. Common names include the Osage Orange, Bois-d’Arc, bodec, hedge-orange, hedge-apple, horse-apple, and mockorange.
With crowded zigzag branches armed with sharp stout spines an inch or more long, a thicket of this small tree is impenetrable. It is now widespread outside of what is thought to be its narrow native range from southern Arkansas through the Red River valley of Oklahoma and Texas.
Osage Orange is the true American hedge tree, and by the 1850s was the most widely planted hedge tree in the Midwest. Before wire fences were popular, it was extensively planted along fence rows.
Francis Porcher wrote in 1863, “It thus perfectly secures orchards, fruit-yards, stables, sheepfolds, and pasture grounds from all thieves, rogues, dogs, wolves, etc., and one good gate, well locked, makes a whole farm secure from all intruders of whatever description.”
The exceedingly hard, coarse-grained, heavy, bright orange wood has excellent flexibility and elasticity coupled with strength and density. In an 1810 account of his explorations in Missouri, John Bradbury found two Osage Orange trees growing in the garden of Pierre Chouteau, one of the first settlers in St. Louis.
The trees were introduced to the settlement by Osage Indians, hence the common name of the tree. The Osage valued the wood for war clubs and especially bows. It was prized so highly that a bow made from the wood was worth a horse and blanket in trade.
Today the tree simply suffers from little appreciation, thought of as a gangly undesirable weed tree. One person’s weed tree is another’s valuable natural resource. The Osage Orange can be either one.
I love these trees. There are few giant ones very near to my home in Fayetteville. I’ve always loved that in Donald Harrington’s book, The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozark’s, the the name commonly used is Bois D’ Arc, pronounced Bow Dark was so named because early Americans made bows of the arc, for shooting arrows.