Osage-orange

I have known this gnarled line of sentinels ever since I was a little kid, and old enough to range a mile away from the familial homestead. They're osage-orange trees, Maclura pomifera, and to me they exude a certain twisted charm. When I was just a lad, these trees stood tall, buffering one of Worthington, Ohio's main arteries. I've always harbored a niggling fear that the neighboring office complex maintenance staff would one day hack them down, disgusted with the trees' annual dump of large pulpy fruit.

But apparently others in the area have succumbed to the charm of the "hedge-apple", and so they remain.

As osage-orange trees go, these are titans. The state champ - biggest known specimen in Ohio - is a Coshocton County resident, and it stretches 60 feet skyward. These trees aren't all that far behind. Our line of trees was planted many decades ago, back when neighboring Wilson Bridge Road was just a rural lane. Now, the amoebic ever-expanding suburban sprawl has long eaten the farm fields that these windbreak trees once sheltered. Many of my boyhood wildlands have been consumed by pavement, homes, offices, and box stores, but somehow these tough-wooded trees have survived the axe.

The brains of the tree - in botanicospeak, an aggregation of fleshy drupes. We'll call it a fruit :-) These hedge-apples resemble the lobes of a brain, with the tightly packed drupes forming  a random squiggly mass. One of these things weighs a lot, too, and I can tell you that osage-orange fruit make formidable projectiles when opposing gangs of young boys dispatch them against the opposition.

For the most part, animals shun the pulpy hedge-apples, probably in part because they are well-saturated with a foul whitish latex somewhat like the goo found in milkweed plants. But some animals go for them. When I wheeled into the neighboring office complex's back lot, which was strewn with fruit, I surprised two gray squirrels which were industriously tearing the hedge-apples apart.

Apparently squirrels find it worth their while to do battle with the gummy pulp in order to get at the (presumably) tasty seeds buried within. Thus, squirrels may be agents of dispersal for this tree, but they probably aren't the animals that co-evolved with osage-oranges and once acted as the prime transporter of its seeds.

This is the boot-shaped native range of osage-orange - just a limited portion of Texas, and a wee nip of Arkansas and Oklahoma. All the trees that one sees out of this area were brought there by people. A theory has it that now extinct large mammals, possibly giant ground sloths and other large Pleistocene mammals, were the primary consumers of osage-orange fruit. These animals went extinct not long after the first humans colonized North America, and thus the tree's spread was sharply arrested. That's a cool hypothesis.

One animal that still does use the tree heavily are Loggerhead Shrikes. Ones study of nesting shrikes not far from the native range of osage-orange found that nearly 70% of the 57 located nests were nestled within the dense gnarly boughs of Maclura pomifera. Such a tree is an Eden for the "butcherbird". The thick branching provides wonderful cover and support, and the thorny twigs offer plenty of spears on which these feathered impalers can skewer their victims.