Thanksgiving is about a week off , and along with thinking about all the food , my thought often turn to how I ’m going to adorn the tabular array . One of my best-loved pick for mesa décor is the hedging apple ( Maclura pomifera ) , also screw as Osage River orange or horse apple . We have a large crystal bowl that we love to fill with these dark-green curiosities . They make the perfect fall laurel wreath and are readily available along our roadsides at this fourth dimension of year .
Part of the fascination I have today with this curious looking fruit is its survival plan . All the other large , fleshy fruit aboriginal to North America have an animal better half that dines on them and assist in their seed dispersal . Unfortunately for the hedge orchard apple tree , it ’s believed that the beast in interrogation was a case of laziness that pass out before human being inhabited North America . M. pomiferaand the acedia lived together happily in what is known as the Red River drainage of Texas , Oklahoma and Arkansas .
You would cogitate that a flora that lost its means of germ dispersal would have died out long ago , and yet , the hedge apple has been institute in every State Department in North America and spread even up into Canada . How is that possible ? I think the plant got creative and just find a new partner . F.D. Richards / Flickr
Humans have told all manner of narration about the yield ofM. pomifera . Folklore say that placing it in your business firm it will force out spiders and cricket . They were emphatically a fixedness of my puerility , and I think that a fresh spate of hedge apple were place in the corner of the basement each crepuscule . While it has never been proven efficient against spiders or crickets , it appears that the hedge - Malus pumila sap repels cockroaches .
Hedge apple are also comestible , though you wo n’t see them mentioned often in foraging cookery book . The seeds are moderately difficult to excerpt because they are snare inside the hard out finish , implant in woody flesh and encapsulated in a vile air pocket . I have n’t ever heard anyone describe the taste as “ deserving it , ” so , we ca n’t impute the survival of this plant life to its ability to tempt the human palate . Hedge Malus pumila are delicious snack for horses and squirrel , too , but again , they are n’t really coiffure up to distribute the seeds .
The reason why the tree has been spread all across North America is less about the yield and more about the Sir Henry Wood .
F.D. Richards/Flickr
Horse High, Bull Strong and Hog Tight
While the yield get human curiosity about the tree , it was the wood that hold our attention . The bendable limbs were a pet of the Native Americans who used them for bow , and settlers used the Grant Wood to write in their animals . It was n’t until 1880 that barbed conducting wire come along , so before then , rancher ask a way to keep their animals from betray forth . Slips ofM. pomiferaplanted closely together and kept dress form a survive hedgerow that is well-nigh dodging - proof . ( I say “ nearly ” because I still have n’t cope with a caprine animal that I would trust with an eatable fence . I ’d love to hear from folks who ’ve adjudicate it . )
When the mammoths and sloths pall out , the hedgerow apple tree could have gone with them . fortunately for them , the fruit that used to attract a marauder was interesting enough to enchant the human who had motive for shelter and fencing material . As I mob up a trough of hedging orchard apple tree for my Thanksgiving centerpiece , it make me chuckle that this “ useless ” yield is still work its chicane with the like of me .
Miche`le/Flickr
