Osage Oranges

One day's worth of oranges

We are not sure who planted this annoying tree.  The Walker family has connections to Thomas Jefferson.  Dr. Thomas Walker, who was born on this property, conducted expeditions west at the request of Jefferson.  Although Dr. Walker had left King and Queen County by the time the house was built, the possibility exists that he could have sent his family some seeds or clippings.  

An Osage orange tree has an inch to inch and a half thorn.  

From Facebook:

Bayou-Diversity (28 May 2023) OSAGE ORANGE On May 7, 1857 an enslaved man named Hastings was put to work trimming a dense, thorny hedge around a plantation field just southwest of Bastrop. Six years later on June 7, 1863, Confederate Major General J.G. Walker attacked a Union force at Milliken’s Bend in Madison Parish in hopes of relieving pressure on the besieged fortress of Vicksburg. His attack was thwarted, in part, because of a dense hedge around part of the village. Yankees massed behind the hedge and fired through the openings. General Walker wrote “Upon reaching the hedges it was utterly impracticable to pass them except through the few openings left for convenience by the planter."

The plant that contributed to the enslaved man’s misery and the Rebels’ frustration was osage orange, also known as bois d’arc or horse apple. Originally, it likely grew only along the Red River Valley in Texas and Oklahoma. The name of the tree comes from the Osage tribe, which lived in that area and valued the strong, elastic wood to make bows. The spread of the species into other areas began as the Osage traded it among Plains and southeastern Indian groups. White settlers quickly learned to use the tree to create impenetrable living fences before the invention of barbed wire. Saplings were pruned to promote a bushy growth. “Horse high, bull strong and hog tight” were the criteria for a good osage orange hedge. This meant that it was tall enough that a horse could not jump it, strong enough that a bull could not push through it, and woven so tightly that not even a hog could root through.

Osage orange is in the mulberry family. It grows to 40 feet tall and is known for its unusual fruits, which are hard, warty, yellow-green, and about the size of a soft ball. Squirrels relish them, but oddly few other animals eat the fleshy fruits. Scientists speculate that now-extinct large mammals such as ground sloths, mammoths, and mastodons once ate the fruits and dispersed the seeds. The wood is still used for fence posts, and at one time the bark was used for tanning leather and making a yellow dye.

The famous Dunbar and Hunter expedition up the Ouachita River in 1804 made the first known scientific documentation of osage orange in North America. Two hundred years ago they recorded it as growing upstream of what is now Monroe, and in their report to Thomas Jefferson said that these plants had been transplanted from somewhere else. Today it is still possible to find descendants of the early hedges scattered as individuals along the high banks of the river and bayous such as Desiard and Bartholomew. They harbor a bit of local history under that gray, ridged bark.

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