Tree Talk: Ode to Osage Orange

Contributed

The Osage Orange may be a bit of a 'problem child' as it's thorny trunk can injure and its inedible 'brain-shaped' fruit (pictured here) often gets messy from wildlife attempting to find it's elusive, edible bits. Hannah Rhodes dives into this divisive tree in her latest Tree Talk.

The Osage Orange is a divisive, possibly unloveable tree. Its roots are bright orange, it grows long thorns directly from its trunk, it creates a spindly net of bramble-like branches, and it produces an inedible brain-shaped fruit that not even squirrels will use. In my quick mental search for the spookiest native trees, this one popped up immediately.

And yet, not a single tree is scarier than the windstorm we experienced in Erie last month, and the approximately 900 trees that came down with it. The image of a large tree down in the middle of Erie Cemetery will stick with me forever. Now I'm no arborist (not officially, anyway), but I have a layman's theory as to why Erie Cemetery lost nearly every single one of its trees in the September windstorm. In looking around Erie in the aftermath of the storm, so many of the downed trees were "street" trees, unmoored by a neighboring network of roots and native grasses, more completely susceptible to windfall than a tree might be in a forest. In the graveyard, then, there's a similar problem – the grand, fallen trees there may have had strong roots, but they had to contend for stability with graves. It must be difficult for a tree to stay standing with so many loose grips in the ground, no matter how determined the tree may be.

Maybe not for the Osage Orange tree, though. It's a stubborn and persistent species. The native range of Maclura pomifera is actually more southeastern (think Texas, Oklahoma), but it's been since naturalized to our area. This could have something to do with the displacement of the tree's namesake people – the Osage Tribe were originally nomadic across the Ohio River Valley, American Midwest, and Great Plains regions before being wrongfully forced to cede their land as a "result" of the Louisiana Purchase.

We can't know if the Osage Orange was then scattered in exactitude along with the Osage people, but we can easily identify the tree where it ended up growing. The most defining feature of the Osage Orange is its fruit — a green, chartreuse, ridged ball of useless plant matter. In fact, the latex content of the fruit is so high that small mammals cannot physically ingest it all, and will often tear the fruit apart instead in an attempt to eke out the nutritious bits. This makes the tree a certifiable "mess," a social nuisance, in addition to a thorny liability; and yet, who doesn't love a problem child?

I've planted my fair share of Osage Orange in Erie, always tucked into a treeline and away from eventual detection, in an attempt to love more unloveable things.

Hannah Rhodes is a volunteer at LEAF and a big fan of trees. She can be reached at hannah@leaferie.org