“We can’t sell citrus fruits,” a fellow nursery owner told me.
He was watching a row of nasty potted trees in my nursery. He asked what they were and I said to him, “Osage Orange.”
“They are not really citrus fruits,” I explained.
Osage Oranges are strange plants. They are in the mulberry family, but it’s very troublesome. They are completely inedible and have huge green fruits filled with latex sap. They are hated by some and loved by others.
They really shine as hedges.
(Osage Orange’s) The original range was limited to parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana until it was brought in for windproofing and living fences in the 1880s. Miles of hedges were built at the time by planting thousands of young Osage orange trees side by side. Many hedges still offer views of fields and meadows that are divided today.
Once established, young thorny trees were pruned to promote thick, bushy growth. The term “high horse, strength of a bull, strength of a bull” used to describe an osage orange means that the row of hedges had been pruned, so tall the horse wouldn’t let it jump, and the bull pushed it on and so firmly woven that even a pig could not find it.
Last year I started at least 50 people at a plant nursery.
I took them to the show after the show, but they rarely sold them. It’s hard to convince people who need a barbed tree growing hard-to-eat green cannonball fruit.
But they are of very hard orange wood, beautiful and awful.
Briary’s Skip Elliot made some pipes out of Osage like this.
I think we’re going to plant an unsold Osage orange tree along the front of our property. I like the idea of having Osage Wood at some point and having an invasive boundary hedge. They must have made some amazing biochar too.
