This tree is one of my favorites.  I like plants that give MORE.  I like plants that do something.  The Osage orange, or Bodark, has a great story to tell about it.   Heck, this tree has many stories.  I’ll give you some quick snippets chronologically.

    The tree has a big bumpy fruit - the size of a grapefruit.  But scientists didn’t know why it had these fruits.  Most fruits evolve as a dispersal mechanism for plants to propogate. Horses will eat the fruits.  But, prior to Europeans coming to North America, there were no horses in North America.  No living animals in North American ate the big fruit.  Well, those smart scientists figured that dinosaurs were the propogators when they were around.  When the dinosaurs died out, the Bodark lived on.  This tree makes dinosaur feed.  Not too handy a purpose to have for a tree.  But, you never know.

    Native Americans were the next on the scene to propogate the Bodark.  Native Americans, before Europeans arrived on the scene, revered the Bodark wood for bows and war clubs.  Lewis and Clark noted that the native Americans would travels many miles to trade the wood.  The bow-making properties of the wood and this history gives the wood  one of its common names - Bois d’arc (French for bow wood).  There is a great website tribute to this also at www.osageorange.com.  So, if you grow Bodark trees you can make archery bows.   This might come in handy.

    European settlers were the next to get onto the Bodark bandwagon. Settlers would use the tough, hard, and thorny wood as a hedge.  I assume they would bury seeds from the fruit.  Each fruit has many many seeds.  The tree has wicked thorns.  They alternate as barbed wire does.  Walter Prescott Webb wrote that farmers using these hedge apples would have fences, "pig tight, horse high, and bull strong."  Webb's book on prairie life also states that bushells of Osage oranges would sell for up to $50 per bushell.  With the invention of barbed wire, the hedges dropped out of use.  A fun book, Remarkable Plants of Texas, by Matt Warnick Turner surmises that barbed wire inventors used the Bodark thorn placement as a design aid.  The rot resistance of Bodark had tree posts being used for the barbed wire.  With our world's focus on being more natural, the price of bushells of Bodark fruit might once again rise.  Plant your own hedge of Bodark along a fence line.  Save the fruit for the farmer's market.