The Osage orange, Texas’s ugliest fruit (2021)

https://www.texasmonthly.com/being-texan/osage-orange-history/

by prismatic • 4 years ago

86 68 4 years ago

jcpst• 4 years ago

The kids and I like to kick the hedge apples around at the park. I also once had a some hardwood jewelry made from osage orange that looked quite nice.

Tagbert5• 4 years ago

The wood is dense and has a distinctive yellow color that can look quite nice when polished.

cafard• 4 years ago

"This led French explorers to dub the tree the bois d’arc, meaning “wood of the bow” (and, of course, English speakers dubbed it the Osage orange after the tribe that famously put it to use)."

And, in southwestern American speech, "bowdock", I believe.

There are a couple of osage orange trees near where I live in Washington, DC.

legerdemain• 4 years ago

I remember spotting one near the FDA building in College Park, Maryland. I wonder if the grapefruit-sized fruit could be used for children's crafts and decorating, or if it just starts rotting.

eppp2• 4 years ago

You do not really want to mess with them. They have a sticky fluid in them and it can irritate the skin if you cut into them.

jcmeyrignac• 4 years ago

I'm in France in a city called Vichy, and there are several "Orangers des Osages". With my wife, we were surprised by the quantity of fruits lying under these trees, and wondered if there was any kind of usage for them. Apparently not.

yourapostasy• 4 years ago

...and wondered if there was any kind of usage for them.

When cut open, they release a natural insect repellent. Works against many species of ants and cockroaches among other insects.

The wood is excellent material for fences. Very tough and durable.

mytailorisrich• 4 years ago

"Bow-wood" is a more appropriate translation of "bois d'arc", and is used by Wikipedia.

Apparently, "bowdock" and other similar names are a corruption of "bois d'arc".

dylan6049• 4 years ago

you say corruption, we say accent

skipkey• 4 years ago

In rural Texas, we pronounced it “bow-dark” and called them horse apples, which the article mentions. It was very common to hang swings from them.

exabrial• 4 years ago

Before the days of cell phones, instagram, tiktok, and one used a phone line to dial-up to the internet... we had to entertain ourselves in creative ways.

One such way was "Hedging the Town".

You get a couple of buddies, ride out to a hedge row in one of their pickups, fill the bed of the pickup to the rails with hedge apples.

You then drive to the rival nearby's town main intersection (in the midwest, there's only usually one major intersection that has a stoplight or 4 way stop) and back up into the middle of it around 1am in the morning.

You then drop the tailgate and floor the gas, spreading hedgeapples in a randomized layout in the intersection. By doing this, you are assisting with biodiversity in the rival town. Unfortunately local residents were not commonly pleased with said efforts to help plant diversity.

dylan6049• 4 years ago

There's also the help encouraging diversity in grass types by the marching band forming the block letter shapes of their school on the opposing team's field. While in this formation, the band members empty their pockets that had been full of grass seeds. Otherwise, the opposing team's field would just be a monoculture of grass, and that's never a good thing for diversity

AuthorizedCust• 4 years ago

That’s what the Southern Methodist University’s Mustang Band did to tcu’s field in 2000: https://magazine.tcu.edu/spring-2000/growing-rivalry/

SMU is in Dallas, Texas.

I’m not sure that’s common outside of that awesome, righteous incident?

SaintGhurka• 4 years ago

It's interesting to see a claim in the article that Wikipedia disputes.

Texas Monthly: "Lipscomb said that the unusually large fruit is a remnant of prehistoric times, once eaten by massive, now-extinct animals like the woolly mammoth"

Wikipedia: "Controversial suggestions have been made that it was consumed by extinct Pleistocene megafauna, but these claims have been criticised as lacking empirical evidence."

It seems likely that something must have eaten them at some point to spread the species around. Those things weigh about 2 pounds and wouldn't move far without help from an animal - or maybe a tornado. I would love to find out that there's a species on this planet whose reproductive strategy depended on tornadoes.

eppp2• 4 years ago

Squirrels eat them regularly at my house.

nerdponx• 4 years ago

Squirrels and raccoons are very good at shredding even the toughest of pumpkin skins and garbage can lids. I'm sure they can handle some overripe fruit that plopped off a tree.

masklinn• 4 years ago

But do they spread the seed or do they eat the seed?

The seed seems rather large, and the fruit is uselessly huge by comparison, it doesn’t seem much like the sort of things which would be adapted to being spread by squirrels.

Tagbert5• 4 years ago

Squirrels do eat them, especially the seeds. I suspect that they are not the ideal distribution vector for Osage oranges since they consume the seeds rather than distribute them.

BTW - we always called them “hedge apples”

Loughla• 4 years ago

They roll pretty well until they get mushy, then the seeds are pretty easily dispersed by rain. And the mature tree does really well on hillsides/near streams. So maybe water is the answer?

Also, I'm certain that something ate them. I've personally seen Squirrels, groundhogs, horses, and cows eat them.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

Around my house, like the elms, hercules club, and hackberries that are native, bois d'arc tends to be spread by birds shitting the seeds. I have a grove of birdshit elms that I written previously about.

evan_2• 4 years ago

We used to huck 'em at each other when I was a kid, novel strategy but it might work...

elihu3• 4 years ago

I'm not from Texas, but in Oregon we have a plant, the wild cucumber, that served in the same ecological niche, being a fruit whose sole purpose seems to be furnishing children with satisfying projectiles.

The wild cucumber is shaped like a hand grenade, and splatters a glue-like substance on the target.

Someone in another comment speculated on whether it's possible for some fruit to evolve to propagate its seeds across the landscape by tornado. I suppose it might also be possible for a plant to evolve to present passers-by an irresistible temptation to throw it at someone.

dylan6049• 4 years ago

"Controversial suggestions

whoa there buddy! thems fightin words. round here, in polite society, we refer to these as tall tales. they're part of the bigger in texas lore. calling them controversial is darn right rude that only a city slicker northerner would dare utter in the great state! that being said, i say bless your heart!

DoreenMichele• 4 years ago

I would love to find out that there's a species on this planet whose reproductive strategy depended on tornadoes.

Not exactly the same thing:

Birds, insects hitch a ride in hurricanes

https://wildlife.org/birds-insects-hitch-a-ride-in-hurricane...

Hurricanes May Bring Unusual Pests

https://specialtycropindustry.com/hurricanes-may-bring-unusu...

I have read that it is believed that flies and other insects found on remote islands originate with one or a few being blown in on a hurricane.

beauzero• 4 years ago

Good wood for fence posts, bad fruit for cows choking on (no upper front teeth) and can swallow them whole.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

A long time ago I helped remove a barb-wire fence where bois d'arc posts were used as corners. The fence had been built by the owner's grandfather and was more than 50 years old. Those bois d'arc posts were deep yellow inside, rock hard, and with zero rot after all that time in the Texas dirt.

dylan6049• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if we're praising the wood or slagging the texas dirt ;-)

mattpallissard• 4 years ago

It really is a great material. I've replaced a few broken by equipment pushing 100 years old on a farm in Illinois.

We had 4x4s in the shop but would still replace them with Osage orange limbs. Logic was even though it was more work to find a new limb, it was less work in that long run.

Makes absolutely excellent seasoned cord word as well.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

When I was a kid we called them horse-apples or bois d'arc. We chunked those huge things at each other playing dumb-ass war games.

As an young adult I took an opportunity to quit my perfectly good job and ride off into the wind on a horseback trip with a cousin that would've placed us in Wyoming as an initial stop and ultimately would've taken us to northern British Columbia had everything worked the way we "planned". I am using the most ill-fitting, inaccurate usage of planning here as our only real preparation involved acclimating our mounts and our posteriors to the saddle and acquiring far too few items necessary to sustain such a journey at the time. Neither of us even carried a map. We just figured that with the limited funds available and a strong enough desire to taste the breeze we could figure it out on the way.

I will never forget one of our first nights on the "trail" out along the highway across central Texas when we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares. We were clearly a curiosity and a number of people watched as we plodded along thru town trying to keep our less dedicated steeds pointed down the right sidewalks. On the square, there was an old legacy business where a cobbler or saddle-maker had a shop and out front above the awning to advertise was a large sign and a kid-sized statuesque version of a paint horse hanging over the sidewalk to draw the eye to the small shop.

As we passed under that paint horse statue my own mount let fly a large volume of suitably digested plant matter from the previous morning's grazing of the Johnson grass growing along the highway where we pitched our bedrolls.

It was quite fitting and a perfect spot for a pile of horse shit and we all had a great chuckle.

Continuing out of town along one of the small farm-to-market roads where we hoped to find a spot to camp later we found ourselves passing the second-from-last house out by the city limits sign. There were people in the yard including several kids who were enthralled by our horses. A couple of the parents approached us and asked whether we could let their kids have a quick ride before we passed on out of town. Since our "schedules" were largely free of any planned events for that afternoon or any of the other upcoming afternoons we gladly agreed and were met with gleeful shouts as they jockeyed amongst themselves for the rights to plant the first butt in a saddle.

1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C). We surrendered our sweaty mounts to the exuberance of youth and the control of their parents and as we visited with the other parents waiting for their own child's turn we found ourselves invited to have supper and spend the night with their family. This was at the time a fantastic development for us since our supplies had been diminished a bit over the preceding days and the thought of a supper and a bedroll inside a house on the floor was quite appealing. The price on our end was quite agreeable too - allow the kids to ride our horses and they would take care of removing the saddles, brushing the horses down and grazing them in the backyard vegetation overnight. This was indeed luck of the purest kind and a clear sign from the universe that all would somehow work out in the end for us.

There were two related families living in this large two-story Victorian house that obviously needed a bit of love on the outside but was brim-full on the inside once they all were in their proper places for the evening. One of the husbands approached me and took me off to the side and this is the part where the bois d'arc comes into play in this long post that most will never read.

He told me that his wife had noticed that I was afflicted by a large protruding wart on my left elbow and that if I was agreeable that she would like to help me eliminate that wart but she was too shy to approach me about it. Well, I'm a bit of a shy person myself but she had made a proposition that I had to admit was quite attractive so we wandered over to where she was standing, under a huge bois d'arc tree that shaded a large part of their back yard.

After apologizing, she told me that she was Cherokee, originally from Oklahoma and that she had noticed my wart and wanted to help us since we had added so much joy to their kid's afternoons. She told me that they had a treatment for warts that would allow me to be rid of it in a few weeks if I could keep it going after we pulled out of town the next day. Well, I've always been open to learning anything that I didn't know yesterday so she asked to borrow my hunting knife that I carried sheathed on my hip. I have to admit that the prospect of backyard surgery with a hunting knife that might not be that sanitary was a bit concerning but I handed over the knife and she took it and started explaining what she would do and how I would need to continue in the next couple weeks.

I watched as she made a cut on a young bois d'arc limb through the bark along the growth direction and waited as the white sap began to flow. Using the edge of the knife she collected a large enough amount of sap to completely surround that large protrusion and coat it thoroughly. She said that I needed to let the sap dry in place and that if it all washed off in the rain to reapply as soon as possible so that it all stayed covered. She told me the sap was beneficial and if I could keep it covered for two weeks that within 6 weeks the wart would fall off and leave normal skin in its place.

As fate would have it and as luck sometimes goes there was no rain over the next few weeks to wash that sap from my elbow and all the sweat that I managed to produce couldn't erase the translucent black circle of dried sap from my elbow. Days after leaving these generous folks behind us, we had managed to find temporary work in a small town miles down the highway from this house on a local "ranch" working the absentee owner's cattle and in return we had use of a pole barn shed for nightly shelter and all the beans and cornbread we could eat at no charge. There was no shower or other facilities so normal hygiene for us would hold no great attraction for most people today. We developed a funk that could probably be classified as a gaseous bioweapon if it didn't burn up the tools used to analyze its noxious properties first.

After several weeks out on the ranch working every day in the heat we found ourselves invited guests of the ranch owner who would be visiting and hosting a party where we could mix and mingle with lots of people including several of the current crop of Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. There would be good food with or without beans and plenty of it and best of all, free beer.

We decided that we had to confront the lingering clouds of man-funk and find a way to clean our dusty clothes and cowboy hats or we would need to decline this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Inquiring with the owner about how we could handle this dilemma we finally discovered something that we would've known in advance had we bothered to make any solid plans. We were less than a mile from the cool, clear waters of the mighty Brazos River. Armed with that knowledge, a sudden enthusiasm for cleanliness and a couple bars of Ivory soap that had seemed a bit of overkill due to the lack of water, we saddled our trusty mounts and rode over to that part of the ranch that butted up to the river.

Like a couple of school-boys playing hooky from class we shucked our duds, grabbed the soap and stepped off into the shallow clear waters, almost deep enough to reach the dangles and we began to splash that cold water all over and hoot and whoop loudly. This was more clean water than we had seen in one place since we last saw a lake weeks ago. As we stood there in the water in the sun and tried to power that soap through the accumulated crud the bar of soap found my left elbow. Now normally any hard contact on that wart would bring a sharp pain. That Ivory soap glided across that elbow with no hint of a bump or no pain from contact and I so bent everything around to inspect. The wart had fallen off all by itself and there was no indication other than a remnant halo of dirty, dried bois d'arc sap to suggest that anything had ever been there but regular skin. It had by that time been about 6 weeks since the lady had smeared that glob of sap on that elbow and I had not added nor subtracted anything in the meantime. There had been a dark circle of sap which held a bit of daily grit but otherwise was unchanged. With one treatment and a seemingly appropriate level of sunshine and neglect, that wart had fallen off and though it has been more than four decades it has not returned.

That is my true story. If you lasted this long you might've enjoyed being on that ride. Happy trails!

Tagbert5• 4 years ago

Good story.

I’m not surprised that the sap might have cured your wart. The sap contains latex and other irritating components. Several cures for warps involve covering them with an irritant and triggering the body to slough off a layer of skin containing the wart. Compound-W is salicylic acid in a waterproof carrier that irritates the skin into peeling off. Some people have used duct tape placed over the wart for that.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

Thanks for reading. I learned about the latex in the sap and the duct tape only a couple of years ago and had used Compound-W in the past before these events on a knuckle wart. By the time I encountered this lady I was resigned to having this large wart accompany me thru life since nothing I tried completely removed it.

post-it• 4 years ago

What a high-quality contribution! That was a fun read.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

Thanks for sticking with me. Typing this on a keyboard where the "S" works some of the time was laborious so I'm glad you enjoyed it.

dylan6049• 4 years ago

When I was a kid we called them horse-apples or bois d'arc

When I was a kid I had a grove of these in the front yard. I had heard them referred to all of the names mentioned, but never did I see them spelled until much much later in life. To have seen "bois d'arc" spelled out would have been surprising let alone to know it was french in origin.

As a teenager, it was part of my yard work chores to keep the horse-apples cleared from the ground. Being from texas and out in the boonies, "yard" is doing some heavy lifting. The yard was several acres. We had the bois d'arc trees along with texas pecans--the small thick shelled tougher than an aramdillo to crack open kind. So along with the horse-apples, I had to gather all of the fallen limbs. These went into a pile, and when the pile got big enough, we had a bonfire.

1980 was a hot year in Texas and this day was just another in a record-setting string of days with high temperatures above 100F (37.8C).

This might be the same summer I remember as being old enough to be aware of how hot hot can be in a Texas summer. Maybe it was the record-setting nature that intrigued me, but it definitely sticks out from that time. I would gladly have a summer of a mere 30 consecutive days of triple digits seeing how now we are approaching 90+ days.

we passed through a town with one of those famously stylish courthouse squares.

So so many towns with the old downtown areas of the courthouse in the center of the square with the shops around it. That number goes down quickly filtering by stylish courthouses. Would this happen to have been Waxahachie, or further north near McKinney? As an adult with much different interests than when I was a kid, I am now attracted to this part of Texas history and how modern day is trying to recapture some of that.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

You remind me that for an embarrassingly long time I also had no idea how to spell that correctly. So many words in Texas are not spelled as they are pronounced for a number of reasons.

We also scrounged native hard-sells pecans from wherever we could find them. Old trees in city parks were a great source. Nowadays I have several large easy crackers out here and for the first few years that I lived here I wasted time every season conjuring ways to end up with more ripe pecans than the local birds could abscond with. It was definitely a losing proposition on my end as the crows descended before the nuts were ripe and hauled them as they ripened so that I was largely left with the ones they didn't want to mess with. It became such a joke that I finally gave in and today I sit on the porch and wave as the family of crows that live around my place cycle through stealing my nuts. I am currently trying to lure them close enough to the house to become their friends. Wish me luck.

Yes. 1980 was a doozie. Very memorable when, like me, you spent all day from just before dawn to slightly after dark working outside just waiting for beer thirty when the boss would roll up with some hang-down, cheese, saltines, and an onion with a carton of milk for everyone. That was the 5:30 (beer thirty) supper break for us.

This was the old Hill County Courthouse that burned down in 1993. Willie Nelson did a benefit concert since he was born and raised there in Abbott in Hill County. His annual picnics were the best outdoor events that I ever attended.

dreamcompiler2• 4 years ago

You guys are sparking some memories. I grew up on a small horse farm in North Texas (fairly near McKinney, back when McKinney was a sleepy little town) and we had a ton of "bowdark" trees. The horses loved the apples. We used to shoot them (the apples, not the horses) with our BB guns because their white oozing sap was visible evidence of hitting the target. Never heard of using the sap for warts but I'll take your word for it.

Sometimes my brother would make beautiful things out of bois d'arc wood. If you have the patience and the carbide-tipped tools to work it it's gorgeous wood that lasts forever because it's hard as a rock.

The summer of 1980 was indeed unbearably hot. Texas summers are always hot but the summer of 1980 was something else entirely. I remember not feeling cool for the entire month of July, even at midnight.

krackers• 4 years ago

You can apparently eat the seeds and they taste pretty decent (although minimal yield for the effort involved) [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40U8F8ZD9f0

anenefan• 4 years ago

Prior to covid and border being closed, I was looking to acquire a quantity of seeds to test how they might fare in Northern Australia's climate, with the aim to make a hedge fence. The choice seemed ideal since a hedge of it was claimed to be pig/hog tight, horse high, and bull strong. If it can keep a pig out, it'd probably stop a roo or wallaby.

jonstewart• 4 years ago

There’s a big one down my block in DC, on the corner. In the fall it’s an insane hazard and I either cross the street or cover my head as I walk under it. It also makes a big mess on street, as cars run over the fruit and then they slowly rot.

Beautiful tree, though.

tomcam• 4 years ago

I hate rotting cars in the street

HelixEndeavor• 4 years ago

Horse apples?

zikduruqe• 4 years ago

Farmer in Iowa is setting them to rich folks in New York for $90 per half ounce.

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/kyle-muns...

That's better than kale farmers calling their crop a superfood.

doodlebugging15• 4 years ago

I'm not sure what the birth rate in New York City works out to be but it sounds like there may be more than one sucker born every minute up there.

kubectl_h• 4 years ago

It makes the absolute best firewood.

rotten• 4 years ago

Yes, it has amongst the highest BTU of any wood native to the US.

elihu3• 4 years ago

https://www.wood-database.com/osage-orange/

Seems like it would be an interesting wood to work with. I don't think I've ever seen it for sale at a hardwood store, though maybe I would if I lived in its native geography.

peatmoss• 4 years ago

I get it periodically. I turned handles and nobs out of osage orange for my old school lever espresso machine. It was very orange colored at first, and has darkened to almost brown with exposure to light.

I’ve worked small pieces with hand tools, and found it dense, but enjoyable.

The Osage orange, Texas’s ugliest fruit (2021)

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