Osage-orange
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 Osage-orange foliage and fruit | ||||||||||||||
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| Maclura pomifera (Raf.) Schneid. | ||||||||||||||
The Osage-orange (Maclura pomifera) is a plant in the mulberry family Moraceae. It is also known as Osage-apple, mock orange, hedge-apple, horse-apple, hedge ball, bois d'arc, bodark (mainly in Oklahoma and Texas), and bow wood. Common slang terms for it include monkey brain, monkey ball, monkey orange, and brain fruit due to its brainlike appearance.
The species is dioeceous, with male and female flowers on different plants. It is a small deciduous tree or large shrub, typically growing to 8-15 m tall. The fruit, a syncarp of achenes, is roughly spherical, but bumpy, and 7-15 cm in diameter, and it is filled with a sticky white latex sap. In fall, its color turns a bright yellow-green and it has a faint odor similar to that of oranges.[1]
Maclura pomifera is the sole surviving member of the genus Maclura—of its many relatives from past geologic eras, only fossils remain. It is also, however, a member of the family Moraceae, which encompasses the mulberries and the figs, as well as a large number of tropical and semitropical trees. [2]
The fruits have a pleasant and mild odor, but are inedible for the most part. Although not strongly poisonous, eating it may cause vomiting. The fruits are sometimes torn apart by squirrels to get at the seeds, but few other native animals make use of it as a food source. This is unusual, as most large fleshy fruits serve the function of seed dispersal, accomplished by their consumption by large animals. One recent hypothesis is that the Osage-orange fruit was eaten by a giant ground sloth that became extinct shortly after the first human settlement of North America. Other extinct Pleistocene megafauna, like the mammoth, mastodon and gomphothere may have fed on the fruit and aided in seed dispersal.[3] An equine species that went extinct at the same time also has been suggested as the plant's original dispersal mechanism because modern horses and other livestock will sometimes eat the fruit.[4]
History
The plant is native to an area in the central United States consisting of parts of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, southeastern Oklahoma, a narrow belt in eastern Texas, and the extreme northwest corner of Louisiana, but was not common anywhere. It was a curiosity when Meriwether Lewis sent some slips and cuttings to President Jefferson in March 1804. The samples, donated by "Mr. Peter Choteau, who resided the greater portion of his time for many years with the Osage Nation according to Lewis' letter, didn't take, but later the thorny Osage-orange was widely naturalized th roughout the U.S.[5]
The trees picked up the name bois d'arc, or "bow-wood", because early French settlers observed the wood being used for bow-making by Native Americans. The people of the Osage Nation "esteem the wood of this tree for the making of their bows, that they travel many hundred miles in quest of it," Meriwether Lewis was told in 1804.
Uses
The sharp-thorned trees were planted as cattle-deterring hedges before the introduction of barbed wire. The heavy, closely grained yellow-orange wood is very dense and is prized for tool handles, tree nails, fence posts, electrical insulators, and other applications requiring a strong dimensionally-stable wood that withstands rot. Straight-grained osage timber (most is knotty and twisted) makes very good bows. In Arkansas, in the early 19th century, a good osage bow was worth a horse and a blanket. Additionally, a yellow-orange dye can be extracted from the wood, which can be used as a substitute for fustic and aniline dyes. When dried, the wood also makes excellent fire wood that burns long and hot.
Today, the fruit is sometimes used to deter spiders, cockroaches, boxelder bugs, crickets, fleas, and other insects. Using the fruit in this fashion, at least for spiders, has been debunked.[1] However, hedge apple oil has been shown to effectively repel cockroaches (University of Iowa, 2004), and the fruit may indeed have an effect of repelling cockroaches and boxelder bugs.
References
- ↑ Mabberley, D.J. 1987. The Plant Book. A portable dictionary of the higher plants. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 706 p. ISBN 0-521-34060-8.
- ↑ Dave Wayman, "All About the Osage Orange" Mother Earth News (March/April 1985)
- ↑ Connie Barlow. Anachronistic Fruits and the Ghosts Who Haunt Them. Arnoldia, vol. 61, no. 2 (2001)
- ↑ Connie Barlow and Paul Martin, 2002. The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, and Other Ecological Anachronisms, which covers the now-extinct large herbivores with which fruits like Osage-orange and Avocado co-evolved in the Western Hemisphere.
- ↑ Smithsonian March 2004, p. 35.
