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The Osage-orange Maclura pomifera, is a curious plant in the mulberry family Moraceae. It is also known as hedge-apple, horse-apple, bois d'arc, bodark (in Texas), and bow wood.
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. The color is a bright yellow-green, with a faint orange odor.
The plant is native to an area in the central United States consisting of southwestern Arkansas, southeastern Oklahoma, a narrow belt in eastern Texas, and the extreme northwest corner of Louisiana, but was not common anywhere. The Osage Native American people "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. It was a curiosity when 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 throughout the U.S. The sharp-thorned trees were planted as cattle-deterring hedges before the introduction of barbed wire, and the wood was also used to make fence posts that preserved well in the ground.
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 heavy and closely grained yellow-orange wood is also prized for tool handles.
The heavy, fleshy fruit appears not to be eaten by any animal presently native to North America. 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 sloth that became extinct shortly after the first human settlement of North America. As horses and other livestock will eat the fruit, and the horse evolved in North America, horses have also been suggested as the plant's original dispersal mechanism. Humans do not eat this fruit, because of its bitter taste. Where not eaten by horses, they are mostly left to rot where they fall.
References
- Barlow, Connie 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.
- Mabberley, D.J. 1987. The Plant Book. A portable dictionary of the higher plants. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 706 p. ISBN 0521340608.
- Smithsonian March 2004, p. 35.
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