What’s so odd about this, is that the tree grows so fast. It was the preferred bow-wood for American Indians, hence the French-derived common name “bois d’arc” or “bodark” – literally “tree of the bow.” Osage orange wood, especially when dead, will dull a chainsaw in short order. On the Janka hardness scale it ranks 2620 – compare this to white oak (1360) or hickory (1820). It is exceedingly tough thorny, drought-tolerant, its wood, leaves and fruit impregnated with insecticidal and antifungal compounds. This is rough country – hot, dry, windy, the river itself salty – and the harshness of the terrain has branded itself onto this tree.
While these other species are distributed fairly widely, Osage orange’s native range has always been quite small, restricted to the Red River valley that forms the Texas/Oklahoma border and extends into Arkansas. This fruit, along with those of the locusts and Kentucky coffeetree, belong to a class of evolutionary anachronisms – the large land mammals they co-evolved with, and that formerly distributed their seed, have gone extinct (that these are all extremely tough and adaptable plants is an odd coincidence). The standout is its fruit, those softball-sized “oranges”, “hedge apples” or “monkey brains” that fall to the ground with a startling thump in the early fall.
Osage orange, Maclura pomifera, is a tree possessed of many strange qualities.
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