In one of the last episodes of “Sex and the City,” the
writers slipped a sardonic chuckle into an otherwise serious story. Momentous life
decisions are made, a snowfall creates a magical city scene, a party queen
falls to her death from an upper story window. Oops.
The title of the episode: “Splat!”
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| And I have a large hand. |
This is one of the many thoughts that passes through my mind
as I approach the corner of Iroquois and Keystone Streets on a late October day.
Warty chartreuse softballs line the road on both sides, but none survive where
the wheel treads trail. Instead, roughly circular blots mark the asphalt.
Splat! If you are unlucky enough
to intercept the hefty fruits as they drop from the tree, the sound on the car
rooftop is more of a “Bang!”
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| All this useless beauty. |
Rounding the corner to Wenner Street, I see that osage
oranges have been neatly staged in cannonball-style pyramids all round the bend.
Is this an artistic statement, I wonder each time I drive by? Three days later, my question
is answered. A cardboard sign reads, “FREE! 4 Spiders.” And another comical
image enters my mind. But no, the helpful homeowner is not expecting expect
giant arachnids to carry the fleshy balls home to their young. The fruits have
a reputation—unearned as it turns out—for repelling spiders.
One by one, balls disappear from the piles, presumably to
take their places under the beds of arachnophobes. A few sideliners are
squished—by errant wheels, by curious kids, by squirrels. The once battle-ready
order takes on the same disheveled look as the natural fruit-fall on the other
side of the road. Apparently there is not much demand for osage oranges among
local raccoons and deer. This makes the giant fruits something of an anomaly:
they seem to have lost their function. Too big for most animals, osage oranges,
also known as hedge apples, have been known to cause death among ruminants by
lodging in the esophagus. The great majority of the fleshy fruits rot beneath
the canopies of the trees from which they drop, which makes no sense. Why would
a tree waste energy creating a pulpy fruit when it has nothing to gain? Other
fruit-bearing trees have partners—birds, bats, deer, bear, or for that matter
humans—that disperse their seeds and spread the species over large areas,
keeping them fit and vigorous and adaptable. Why should the osage orange be an
exception to this evolutionary rule?
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| Osage orange flesh is unpalatable to most animals. |
Ecologist Dan Janzen calls this “the riddle of the rotting
fruit.” And he has a theory. Some eleven thousand years ago the great mammoths
and mastodons disappeared from the Western hemisphere; whether they were hunted
to extinction or victims of an abrupt change in climate is a matter of debate. There
is evidence that many of the giants were forest browsers, rather than plains
grazers, and so it is entirely possible that they are the key to the riddle or,
as Connie Barlow puts it in the title of her book about this and other
ecological curiosities, “the ghosts of evolution.” In their absence the fallen osage
oranges are sometimes picked through by squirrels and made viable, but seldom
does the tree species migrate far from the spot where the fruits first bounced
onto the ground.
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| Big thorns make good fences. |
There was a time when humans took over the role of dispersal
agent by planting miles and miles of living fences to keep their livestock from
roaming. Pruned to fence height, the osage orange tree sends up multiple
suckers and becomes "horse high, bull-strong, and hog-tight" in four
years. It is estimated that at the height of its popularity, a quarter million
miles of osage orange hedge grew in this country. (1)
The late 19th century introduction of barbed wire
put an end to this practice but vestiges of the living fences remain in areas
that were once farmed, and continue to produce suckers long after the mother
plants are gone. The wood is now prized for fence posts. Archers value it also,
as they have for centuries. In the early 1800s a well-made osage orange bow was
said to be worth a horse and a blanket, or a “comely young squaw” in trade. Tribal wars were fought for possession of lands with
generous supplies of osage orange trees.
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| The curious rind of the osage orange |
Useless pulp lies smashed on the
road. Splat! Trees that once functioned as living fences are chopped down and
made into dead fences. Strong curved bows of osage orange wood may conceivably
have contributed to the extinction of the animals that once kept it strong. The osage
orange saga, full of twists and ironies, continues, with handmade signs pleading
with anonymous passersby to take these warty green balls and give them a
function—under a bed, or along a basement wall, or anywhere. Just take them.
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| Splat! |
Centuries of history go by; a
tree’s stock rises and falls. Tire treads mark the intersections of Iroquois
and Keystone, of ancient mastodon and modern transportation.
Splat!
Bales S. 2007. Natural
Histories: Stories from the Tennessee Valley
