The Osage Orange of Carrer Maria Montessori

Before barbed wire, this tree was the fence. Osage orange grows dense, thorny and fast, and through the 1850s American farmers planted it in hedge lines across the prairie states to make a barrier that livestock would not push through: horse high, bull strong and hog tight, as the sales pitch went. Barbed wire arrived in the 1870s and ended the trade within a decade, by which point the species had already been shipped to Europe as a curiosity and largely ignored. Barcelona has two on its register and this is the younger of them, planted in 1948 on Carrer Maria Montessori below Montjuic, with a 1.4 metre trunk, 12 metres of height and a crown 15 metres across that is wider than the tree is tall. Its counterpart down in the Parc de la Ciutadella went into the ground 35 years earlier and is the thicker tree; this one has the better spread. The city catalogued it in 1998. What both share is the fruit, a heavy green sphere the size of a grapefruit with a surface like folded brain, which drops in autumn and is eaten by nothing that currently exists. It stands a few minutes' walk from the pepper tree on Carrer Joaquim Blume.