#maclura pomifera

[summerwages]

Osage orange..

[bethanythebogwitch]

It's that time of year where the trees start growing brains again

[crudlynaturephotos]

[1bee2a]

We do know how it spreads naturally! By a very cool animal :) Unfortunately... they're extinct :(

Giant Land Sloths!

They're also why the tree has such prominent thorns that inspired barbed wire. Giant land sloths climbing into the tree for the fruit could damage it a lot, but they did eat the fruit and spread it around.

What spreads it around now? Luck I suppose...

(I actually am in a dendrology class now and learned all of this recently!)

i'm feeling autistic about plants so, maclura pomifera

It's a small North American tree commonly known as the Osage orange or "hedge-apple"

Before barbed wire was invented, it was used to make living fences; when you kept pruning it, it would sprout a thick impenetrable wall of thorny shoots.

The wood's properties are also insane: it's super-strong, burns really hot, and is highly resistant to rotting. It is said to have been VERY valued by Native Americans for making into bows.

However it produces these

DEEPLY CURSED fruits that are huge and inedible. Not poison. They just suck. They're hard, woody and secrete weird latex.

And they produce SO MANY it weighs the whole tree down

Before colonization it was found only in a small patch of Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Now they're everywhere. In the Bluegrass region of Kentucky you see them loaded down with fruit all over the place.

HOWEVER we have no idea how it's supposed to spread naturally. No living animal is any good at seed dispersal. It's like the sunfish of trees.

Why, Maclura pomifera. Why are you like this

[haveyouatethisfruit]

Taiúva

(maclura tinctoria)

Also known as dyer's mulberry, limorana or yellow blackberry

Best known for it's fustic dye production, maclura tinctoria also grows a fruit. Taiúva translates from Tupi-Guarani into 'fruit of the yellow milk tree'. Succulent and sweet as these fruits are, they're best eaten a day after harvesting, as the fruits then have time to excrete the little amount of latex they contain. They are, after all, family of the infamous osage orange (maclura pomifera) which looks great, but leaves a lot to be desired snack-wise. Luckily the snacking experience is a lot better with these guys.

🍑 Reblog to share a fun fruit and to increase sample size! Check out even more interesting fruits in the list of all polled fruits. 🍑

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

Fruit du Maclura pomifera appelé couramment oranger des Osages ou bois d'arc est un arbre d'origine nord-américaine appartient à la même famille que les mûriers. Le Maclura est monotypique, ce qui signifie qu'il n'en existe qu'une seule espèce. Il se développe naturellement dans le sud des États-Unis. Il tire son nom des Oranger des Osages, une tribu indienne qui utilisait le bois du Maclura notamment pour la confection des arcs et des haches. Sa couronne est large et plus ou moins aplatie. Étant donné ses branches très épineuses, il est souvent utilisé comme arbre de haie en Amérique du Nord. Ses feuilles sont de forme variable, bien que le sommet du limbe soit toujours longuement acuminé. Elles deviennent jaunes en automne. Il s'agit d'un arbre dioïque ; il existe donc des spécimens mâles et des spécimens femelles. Il faudra donc un arbre avec des fleurs mâles pour produire du pollen et une autre arbre qui produit des fleurs femelles. Si fécondé cette femelle peut portes des gros fruits ronds de la taille d'une belle orange. Sa floraison discrète est suivie de l'apparition de fruits aromatiques rappelant quelque peu les oranges. Leur peau verruqueuse est initialement jaune verdâtre et vire au jaune orangé par la suite. Résistance moyenne au froid. Le fruits n'est pas comestible étant extrêmement amer. Il y également le cudranier de chine ou mûrier chinois de son nom latin cudrania tricuspidata renommé de nos jours maclura tricuspidata, il a un développement en mode nonchalance, dont il faut savoir attendre et mûrir dans la placidité, être serein armé de cette vertu de la patience qui plus est sachez que les premières fructifications apparaissent au minimum au bout de 10 à 15 années de croissances à partir d'un fuseau ou d'un scion, de plus qui n'est point négligeable ses fruits plus petits et rougeâtres sont comestibles et succulents. Et un avantage il se greffe très bien sur le maclura pomifera l'oranger des Osage, le fait qu'ils sont de la même famille celui de moraceae. Ainsi de cette greffe rendra la fructification encore plus précoce et plus importante, en âge adulte produit plus d'une centaine de kilos.

[recidivist]

The Strange Fruit Of The Osage Orange

The patterns on the fruit of the Osage orange are the reason I photographed them. Osage orange, (Maclura pomifera), also called bowwood, is a thorny tree or shrub native to the south-central United States. Its hard yellow-orange wood was used for bows and war clubs by the Osage and other Native American tribes (hence the name). Female flowers are borne in a dense, nearly spherical cluster and…

[meg-megbanom-ezt]

a varázslatos lebegő narancseper!

[aisling-saoirse]

Today let's talk about one of my favorite (and everyone else's least favorite trees) The Osage Orange Maclura pomifera

The Osage Orange is a pretty unique tree that comes from a previously wide spread variant of tree that has, within the last epoch, been disappearing. You may have noticed these lumpy unpalatable fruit on the ground inexplicably fallen from a tree left to rot as no species really eats them. This is because the animals of dispersal were Pleistocene megafauna (wooly mammoth, ground sloth, mastodon) things that have gone extinct since the last ice age. The fruit is actually poisonous to smaller animals so very large grazers were only capable of consuming these. Since their disappearance we have been left with very few examples of trees that cater to megafauna.

As for the tree itself the wood produces a beautiful yellow wood color and was only really known to Osage natives in the Central Texas region before European Colonization. Settlers utilized the wood for natural paddock fencing as younger branches produce incredibly thorny stems. Non-scientific media often urges us to force this tree into extinction (which it is in no danger of) as it's fruit is considered annoying and has no consumers, which is the most common discussion revolving around the tree online. That is frankly an incredibly stupid opinion I just wanted to make others aware. There is discussion of bringing this tree back in use of silvopasture but for now it makes a fun ornamental.

[crudlynaturephotos]

[stopandlook]

Scientific Name: Maclura pomifera Common Name(s): Osage-orange, bois d’arc, bodark, horse apple, hedge apple Family: Moraceae (mulberry) Life Cycle: Perennial Leaf Retention: Deciduous Habit: Tree USDA L48 Native Status: Native Location: Carrollton, Texas Season(s): Spring

Texas’s ugliest fruit is a harsh assessment.

[notasocialismjoke]

oh my god, there's these trees in my area that drop a fruit on the ground that i've always called crabapples and i immediately thought of them as possibly being former ground sloth food... but i've had trouble finding their species in the past bc i couldn't find a crabapple that matches them.

so thank you for giving me a reason to go look again and find out that i've been calling osage oranges by the wrong name for my entire life (and they might have been, no conclusive science yet):

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

[lazyevaluationranch]

On the post about the Blue Haired Girlfriend's quixotic citrus breeding experiments, @voidingintotheshout​ asked:

I mean, if you wanted a hearty citrus relative, why didn’t you just grow Osage Orange? They can grow as far north as Michigan which is surely further north than anyone could reasonably expect to grow a citrus tree. They’re not edible but then hearty orange isn’t either. Osage Orange are so cool and such a interesting historical plant from the Shelterbelt era of American agriculture. Apparently they do smell like citrus.

We like growing things we can eat. We're a bit North of Michigan, but we could probably grow an Osage Orange here if we wanted to. They're a very cool tree (thanks for the excuse to talk about them!), but they're unrelated to citrus; and not only not edible by humans, they're mostly not edible by anything still walking the earth. The rock-hard lumpy neon green fruits evolved to be crunched by mammoths with molars 30 centimeters across, or maybe prehistoric horses or giant ground sloths.

(Photo by Gale French)

But their seed dispersers went extinct, and for a long time they grew only in the valley of the Red River, where the seeds spread mostly by floating around in the river and being bashed open on rocks.

They probably would have stayed on the river banks, waiting for the mammoths, were it not for the Dust Bowl. In the 1930s, farmers converted swaths of the North American Great Plains to agriculture, replacing deep-rooted native grasses with shallow-rooted crops. Then the wind just blew the unattached dusty dry soil into the air and away. These were the Black Blizzards, dust storms that blotted out the sun as far away as New York City and choked the streets with dust. Day was dark as night. Actual snow, when it fell, was stained red. 

In 1934, American President Roosevelt ordered construction of the Great Plains Shelterbelt, a massive weather control machine. 200 million trees were planted to reduce the wind and increase moisture. The weather machine covered fifty thousand kilometers, in stripes hundreds of kilometers wide. Osage Oranges were widely used; they're great wind-eating trees. They grow well in shallow wind-eroded soil, and each plant grows multiple trunks, so they quickly become dense thorny thickets. 

Humans building massive weather control machines are actually pretty good mammoth substitutes, and once again Osage Orange thickets cover large chunks of North America, baffling human and squirrel alike with their useless ghost-eaten fruits. Nearly a century later, the Shelterbelt is getting a little ragged in places, but it still holds back the winds.

[awkwardbotany]

Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) and fruit of flowering quince (Chaenomeles sp.)

[that-crazy-scorpio-man]

Osage orange (Maclura pomifera)

[affreca]

I'm convinced that fantasy authors other than G.R.R.M have used hedge knight to refer to low level knights, but internet searching is only showing me the references to that series.

Hedge apple is one of the hundred names for Maclura pomifera, at least for the fruit. It's such a weird tree. I love the thought of the plant that outlasted its megafauna, but found a new disperser in humans.

In looking for other names with hedge - Merriam Webster mentions hedge parson, hedge wedding and hedge tavern - which sounds like a good time to me.

I imagine a hedgecat is one of those small, stocky cats that lurk around farms. More independent than a barn cat. Like Mist, a cat I knew who would cycle around the neighborhood, having a litter (and a different name) at each farmstead.

Hedge is underused as a prefix for creatures.

Hedgehog: A small animal found in gardens with a similar, if miniature, behaviour as hogs. Hedgewitch: A small magic user found in gardens with a similar, if miniature, behaviour as witches.

We’re sitting on untapped potential for hedgewolf. Hedgewhale. Hedgegod. Hedgeknight. Does any of this make sense or do I just need to go to sleep.