Alien Invasion

On a lovely fall walk through the park I stumbled upon hundreds of  these:

In all my life on this planet I'd never seen any foliage of this nature. Peter and I both commented on the fact that having come from different parts of the country, and visited so much of it, how unlikely it is we have never seen this type of greenery before.

Peter dubbed them brain apples and I concurred. Oddly enough, that is how I found out what they really are. The internet is a glorious tool that way. I googled brain apple and came up with a photo of one of these exotic produces and fortunately there was an article attached to the image.

These odd looking Plantae are known by many names Osage orange, hedge apple, horse apple, bois d'arc, bodark, or bodock. It is neither an orange nor an apple but related to the mulberry. They are a multiple fruit filled with sticky latex and many seeds. Oddly enough their natural range is East Texas where I grew up but I don't remember seeing any of these as a child. You can eat it but it has a chemically taste that most people are not fond of. Although exposure to frost improves the flavor which can then be likened to cucumber. I have yet to taste them either before or after frost because they really look like alien pods to me.

Currently the only animals that use them as a food source are manly squirrels that eat the many seeds. Horses and cattle are also known to partake in this unusual weed (note the name horse apple) but they tend to choke on the fruits. Due to the many bovine and equine deaths farmers tend to remove these plants from their land.

There are many hypotheses about how seed dispersal occurred throughout North America. Some say a large ground sloth that became extinct shortly after the first human settlement ate the fruit and deposited the seeds through it's feces. Similar theories exist for the mastadon, mammoth, and gomphothere (elephant-like animal). The Osage orange is commonly used as a windbreak in many prairie states, hence the name hedge apple, and even FDR used it in a plan to modify weather and prevent soil erosion called "Great Plains Shelterbelt" WPA project.

The wood of the tree is very dense and was coveted by many Native American tribes to make their bows. They would often travel hundreds of miles to amass the trees for the assembly of their primitive tools. Bois d'arc literally translated means "bow wood" and was given to the tree from early French settlers who witnessed the Natives using it for their weapons. Likely the names bodark, and bodock are bastardizations of that very same label.

No matter how much knowledge and data I compile I still see them as some sort of foreign entity. They just seem so unnatural. It's probably all in my head!