This strange fruit's backstory and odd mix of superlative qualities continue to fascinate
When the fruits of the Osage orange tree fall to the ground in autumn, they demand notice. For one thing, they’re the size of softballs—the largest fruit of any tree native to North America. For another, they’re bright green.Osage orange trees are not related to oranges; they’re more closely related to mulberries. Even more confusingly, the most common name for their fruit is hedge apple .
An Osage orange tree in Ohio. These trees grow 10 to 50 feet tall and produce a very strong yet flexible yellow-orange wood that is sought after for making archery bows.Today Osage orange trees are not uncommon, but they tend to be sparsely distributed, and seeing one is a treat. Or so I felt growing up in Champaign, Illinois, coming across a remarkable Osage orange with huge low-slung branches, perfect for climbing, in a city park. Like most kids I was drawn to the strange, fern-green fruits.
Native Americans may have helped spread the tree and might have traded in its fruits or cuttings in addition to its wood, Kimmerer says. But others think that the Native Americans who traded it, especially the Osage peoples for whom it’s named, would have had an incentive to trade the wood but not the fruits, since the tree’s restricted range gave them more or less exclusive access.—French for “bow-wood”—which eventually became bodark.
The tree was also popular for a time as an alternative host for silkworms. Throughout the 1800s, and into the early 1900s, silk farming had a series of booms and busts in the United States. Osage orange was sometimes used to rear the worms instead of mulberry foliage, though the trend didn’t last long.
This theory is hard to test, but there is some evidence to back it up. For one, researchers found what they believe to be
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