Longtime Westporter — and even longer outdoor enthusiast — Scott Smith has a knack for seeing what most of us miss, all around us right here in our home town.
From time to time, Scott shares his observations with “06880.” Today he writes:
My regular walks along Hillspoint Road, between Sherwood Mill Pond and Compo Beach, always get more interesting this time of year. I see splats of the big fat lime-green fruit that falls along the bend in the road.
The funky roadkill is from the Osage orange (Maclura pomifera), a tree native to the Red River Valley of southern Arkansas, southern Oklahoma and northeast Texas. Known for its thorny branches, grapefruit-size fruits and decay-resistant wood, it was widely planted as a living fence by homesteaders, a practice that allowed its spread across much of the country.
Before the invention of barbed wire in the 1880s, thousands of miles of hedge were constructed by planting Osage orange trees closely together in a line. “Horse-high, bull-strong, and pig-tight,” is how the sodbusters described it.
They also gave it a lot of names: monkey ball, mock orange, horse apple, hedge apple, hedge ball, pap, monkey brains, and yellow-wood, our Wiki friends tell us.
Hillspoint Road hedge apple …
After barbed wire made such hedge fences obsolete, the trees found use as a source of rot-resistant fence posts and an effective windbreak. I figure that is how 2 of the trees found their way a long time ago to Compo Cove.
The fruit is inedible to humans. But I’ve read that squirrels will tear them open to get to the seeds and pulp inside, and other foraging animals will consume the seeds.
My son and I brought some home over the years. The overstuffed deer and squirrels in our yard never touch them.
I’m more intrigued by the theory that this strange fruit is a leftover from the Ice Age, when megafauna like 10-foot-tall ground sloths, mammoths and mastodons roamed the land.
The Osage orange, the thinking goes, developed super-sized fruit for these prehistoric beasts, which then dispersed the partially digested seeds they ate.
… and tree …
With the extinction of the great mammals by Pleistocene hunters, the Osage orange became an “anachronism”—a species whose adaptations no longer have a co-evolved partner in the modern ecosystem.
I suppose you could also argue that this relic of a tree also had a role in its own demise. Its branches were prized by the Osage Native Americans for the construction of strong yet limber bows (another name for the tree is “Bodark,” an altered version of “bois d’arc” or “bow wood,” coined by early French explorers).
I imagine the Osage were not the first indigenous people to weaponize this stout wood.
In any event, I thank the homeowner — and Westport’s Public Works Department — for putting up with the seasonal mess all these years.
And I applaud these plucky survivors for finding such a scenic and lasting home here in Westport.
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… and a quished monkey ball. (All photos/Scott Smith)