This is an Osage Orange. Or a Bodark. Or a Hedge Apple or Horse Apple.
Okay, so mostly that picture is someone’s legs. But down below, that’s the “orange.” It’s pretty. Pretty Weird. Weird Pretty. It’s that sort of ugly pretty.
It’s not an orange. It’s not even really a fruit, orange nor apple. Rather, it’s a bunch of fruits inside a big bumpy green thing that makes your hands sticky no matter how barely it may get bruised. But it doesn’t stop you from always, always gathering them in Missouri in fall.
That’s where this one is from, Missouri. St. Louis, Tower Grove Park, to be exact. My girlfriend made a little homage to autumn with it on the cement by the pond that is built to look like a ruins. It was built sometime in the late 1800′s. Speculating that all kinds of folks were going to be walking through the area, there’s a ton of really beautiful things built up in the late 1800’s over there.
It’s funny because I have totally completely not thought of one of these fruits in somewhere near a decade, but then there it was: pale green & somehow weirdly magnetic because the green of it is just so damned pretty. Memory snaps you back.
I instantly curled my nose. Gross. Like a 10 year old, my instinct: eew, those things are gross. Yet I still went straight over to pick it up. I was totally magnetized by the prettiest green toady looking weird fruit laying over ripe in a pile of fallen leaves.
Once in my hand, I remembered. Eew, gross. Because they are super sticky & it totally sucks when one of them comes careening toward the gradeschool you playing & flailing around in a pile of leaves. More than likely that hedge apple/osage orange has come soaring from the hands of a neighborhood boy known also as “That Little Shit.”
That Little Shit, who is now running off snickering to their cover behind the hedges with his friend, You Jerk.
That was then & this is now. So, I picked up this weirdo lumpy beautiful thing & my hands immediately got glued by milky sticky juice & it smelled instantly of the faintest most florally pleasing scent of Orange. Pretty. That sap, it turns white on contact with air, it also is a base for natural latex. Weird.
It is commonly called Osage Orange because it grows in a region historically known as the home of the Osage Nation. Also known as the part of the country where I grew up, just like me, it flourished in moist rich soils of river valleys. These fast growing, sweet scented trees were prized for making the war clubs and bows of the Osage People. Bois d’arc, Bodark. Highly prized then as it is now for making tool handles, the hard, dense, yellow-orange wood is strong but flexible & polishes up real nice.
In 1804, Meriwether Lewis sent some samples of the wood to President Jefferson from the garden of Peter Chouteau, a founder of St. Louis & Indian agent who spent a lot of time around the Osage People. In 1934, FDR rediscovered this useful tree & put it to work for an ambitious soil erosion solution throughout the prairie lands. Using WPA dollars to empower out-of-work folks, over 18,000 miles of wind-breaking hedges were planted.
The densely growing trees also have crazy huge thorns that create a nearly impenetrable fence, they had been favored before the advent of barbed wire. I can attest to the size of these thorns: I still have a piece of one of these thorns in my hand from this one day when I was shaking rain from the leaves of a tree onto my friends head. I guess I had it coming.
The Maclura Pomifera (it’s real name) is also known to be a natural spider & mosquito repellent, which will be news for my friend Joy should she ever find herself playing in a pile of Horse Apple leaves. While the fruit is sticky, lumpy & weird, I suppose I can grow up. No longer will my reaction to the Osage Orange/Horse Apple be “Eeeww!” it will now be, “Wow, who knew.”
Oh, yeah, but don’t try to eat it, it will probably make you puke.
